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ENGLAND DNDER GLADSTONE. 



1880-1885. 



BY 



K 



JUSTIN HUNTLY McCAETHY, M.P 



SECOND EDITION, REVISED AND ENLARGED. 



•♦♦♦- 



jAN 23 1886/ , 



NEW YORK: 
GEORGE MUNRO, PUBLISHER, 

J7 TO 37 Vandewateb Street, 



\ -. 



JUSTIN H. McCARTHY^S WORKS 

CONTAINED IN THE SEASIDE LIBRARY (POCKET EDITION): 
NO. PRICE. 

131 Maid of Athens 20 

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.\-v 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTEE, PAGE. 

I. The Fall op Lord Beaconsfikld ... 7 

II. The Hew Men •■.....-. 20 

III. Mr. Bradlaugh. — The Fourth Party . . 41 

IV, Afghanistan 53 

V. The Boer War 69 

VI. The Irish Difficulty ..... 91 

VII. Coercion . . . . . . . .113 

VIII. Mr Disraeli — Lord Beaconseiel^ . . 132 

IX. The Land Act . , . . . . 137 

X, Parliamentary Reform . » , 1()5 

XI Ireland IN 1882 =...,.. 177 

XII. The Sixth of May . . . . " . , 192 

XIII. Egypt 212 

XIV. Trouble at Home and Abroad . , . 238 
XV. The Soudan ........ 280 

XVI. The Reform Bill ...... 307 

XVII. The Fall of the Administration . . . 329 



TO 
JSIR JOHN POPE HENNE88Y, KG.M.G., 

GOVERNOR OF MAURITIUS, 

I DEDICATE THIS RECORD OF EVENTS, 

OVER WHICH 

WE HAVE OFTEN TALKED, 

AS A TOKEN OF FRIENDSHIP AND REGARD. 



ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE FALL OF LOED BEACONSFIELD. 

Ok March 8, 1880, Lord Beaconsfield addressed a letter 
to the Duke of Marlborough, in which he announced liis 
intention to dissolve Parliament and " afford an opportu- 
nity to the nation to decide upon a course which will mate- 
rially influence its future fortunes and shape its destiny. " 
Rarely in the century, the letter went on to say, had there 
been an occasion more critical. The peace of Europe and 
the ascendency of England in the European councils de- 
pended upon the verdict she would now be called upon to 
give. But it was not upon any question of foreign policy 
that Lord Beaconsfield avowedly appealed to the country. 
It was the condition of Ireland which prompted him: the 
condition of Ireland was the first topic touched upon in the 
last letter of political importance he was ever destined to 
write. The Home Rule movement represented to Lord 
Beaconsfield a danger " scarcely less disastrous than pesti- 
lence and famine. '■' It had been insidiously supported by 
the Liberal party, who tried to destroy the '' imperial char- 
acter " of England by a " policy of decomposition,^^ 
which Lord Beaconsfield called upon all ^' men of light and 
leading '^ to struggle against. The letter professed to at- 
tack the opponents of the Government for their desire to 
disintegrate the empire: it really called upon the English 
people to set the seal of their approval on the whole course 
of that policy which Lord Beaconsfield and Lord Salisbury 
delighted to style " imperial.'^ 

That same Monday, before Lord Beaconsfield^ s letter 
had yet been published, Sir Stafford Northcote rose to make 
a ministerial statement in the House of Commons. He 
spoke of the grave inconvenience that would be experienced 
by the members of that House if they went into the coun- 



8 ENGLAKD UNDER GLADSTON'E. 

try for Easter without knowing the intentions of the Gov- 
ernment with respect to the dissohition of Parliament. 
The moment that the leader of the House of Commons 
mentioned the word dissolution there was a literal flight of 
members from the chamber. Every man knew that the 
stroke had fallen, and every man was eager to send at once 
to his constituents tlie first ncAvs of the intended appeal to 
the country. In a few minutes the tidings were borne by 
a thousand wires to every electorate in the kingdom. It 
was computed, for the benefit of those who love the small 
statistics of great events, that some seven hundred and 
twenty telegrams were wired from the House of Commons 
on that night. 

The dissolution, though sudden, was scarcely unexpect- 
ed. The Government had lived an unusually long life; six 
years had gone by since it came mto power, and it could, 
at the utmost, only have endured for another twelvemonth. 
Since the beginning of the sixteenth century only eleven 
had lived so long, and only four had endured for a longer 
period. Mr. Gladstone and the Liberal party had been 
arguing vehemently for some time before the dissolution 
that no Government ^ ought to completely exhaust their 
mandate by holding office to the last syllable of their re- 
corded time. Whether they ought or ought not to do so, 
it was clear that they had a perfect right to remain in for 
the rest of their seventh session if so they j^leased ; but it 
was scarcely less clear that they would not act wisely in so 
doing. Ever since Lord Beaconsfield and Lord Salisbury 
came back from Berlin to delight shouting multitudes 
with their stately phrases about peace and honor, the poim- 
larity of the Conservative Ministry had been slowly, stea<:li- 
ly dwindling away. 

The Government could only live on success, or the show 
of success. The fatal brand Althaea burned did not bear 
closer proportion to '' the princess heart of Calydon " than 
did noisy triumph and gaudy surprise to the well-being and 
the popularity of the Government. If Lord Beaconsfield 
had appealed to the country immediately after the return 
from Berlin, the Conservative party might have come back 
to power with an undiminished majority, but in the year 
that lay between that more than Roman triumph and the 
opening of the session of 1880 many things happened, all 
of which told against the popularity of the Government. 



ENGLAi^TD UNDER GLADSTONE. 9' 

In Afghanistan the revival of the Afghan policy of 1840 
brought with it a hideous repetition of the massacre of 
1841. Sir Alexander Burnes had been killed in 1841 by 
an Afghan mob, indignant at England ^s efforts to force a 
British envoy upon them against their will. For the same 
cause Sir Louis Oavagnari was murdered in the same way 
in the autumn of 1879. Once more England had a mur- 
dered envoy to avenge^, once more Oabul had to be occupied 
by an English army. In South Africa there were even 
more serious troubles. We had got into a war with the 
Zulu king, Oetewayo, and we had sustained one terrible 
defeat at Isandlana, where an English force was surround- 
ed and literally cut to pieces by the Zulus. England was 
unaccustomed to such defeats, and the news of the disaster 
sent a profound shock of horror and dismay throughout 
the country. Of course victory could not be long doubtful 
or long delayed. Oetewayo was entirely defeated, his 
lands divided, and he himself captured and imprisoned. 
But the ministerial policy in Afghanistan and in South 
Africa did not increase the popularity of the Ministry. It 
was not, perhaps, so much the injustice of the policy itself 
that was condemned as its ill-success, and the bloodshed of 
English soldiers that accompanied it. 

There were other influences of a more domestic nature 
working against the Government as well. Sir Eichard 
Cross, the Home Secretary, had identified his name and 
the name of the Government with a Water Bill, in which 
an arrangement was made with the City companies which 
was by no means popular. Their Water Bill helped to 
drive them to the country. Not that a Water Bill of some 
kind or other was unneeded. The London water- supply 
is very bad and very dear; perhaps at once the dearest and 
the impurest water-supply in the country. Sir Richard 
Cross — he was then only Mr. Cross — proposed in the sum- 
mer of 1879 to bring in a Bill which should enable the 
Government to buy up the water companies and distribute 
pure water to the metropolis. In answer to Mr. Eawcett, 
he announced that the Government, in treating with the 
water companies, " would take the stocks as they found 
them on such a day — the last day of the half-year — and 
that no speculative' change in the value of stocks would 
have the smallest weight with the Government.^' Nothing 
could be more comforting than these assurances; nothing 



iO EKGLAKD UNDER GLADSTONE. 

more disappointiug than to find in the autumn that, as a 
matter of fact, the Government were prepared to pay the 
water companies a very much larger jjrice than the market 
vahie of the shares in August, from which they had very 
considerably risen in the ensuing months. A sum of nine 
millions was sufficient to cover the original cost of the 
water- woi'ks; their market value in the August of Mr. 
Crosses reassuring speech was under nineteen millions. 
Yet Mr. Cross, on the basis of extraordinary calculations 
which wholly failed to impress not merely the public mind 
but the mind of the majority of his own party, proposed to 
pay the water companies very nearly thirty millions. • Tlie 
country railed and laughed at the new measure. Conser- 
vative adherents warned their leaders that they would not 
vote for it. This was bad ; but it was not all. It was felt 
for some time that the Budget would be unsatisfactory, and 
unsatisfactory it proved to be. The preceding years had 
not been years of signal prosperity; the foreign policy of 
the Prime Minister had made manj'^ exceptional demands of 
the heaviest kind upon the resources of the country. Wars 
in all directions, and the ostentatious preparations for wars 
which neV3r took the field, had swelled the total of the de- 
ficit to an alarming degree, while the revenue had not risen 
in anything like a proportionate measure. The receipts 
were only some eighty millions odd; the expenditure ex- 
ceeded that sum by over three millions. An accumulated 
deficit ot some eight millions of outstanding bonds and bills 
Sir Stafford Northcote proposed to meet by renewing bills 
for two miUions, and creating terminable annuities to be 
paid olf at the end of 1885 to cover the remaining six mill- 
ions. In order to liquidate these six millions during the 
five years, Sir Stafford Northcote required an annual pay- 
ment of £1,400,000 to cover principal and interest. To 
meet this annual payment the Chancellor of the Exchequer 
added £800,000 to the National Debt, and seized upon the 
sinking fund which he had himself established for the pur- 
pose of slowly but surely reducing the National Debt. The 
Budget depressed the Conservatives and delighted the 
Liberals. It afforded Mr. Gladstone some of the best 
weapons with which to assail the Government. Sir Stafford 
Northcote^s proposal to increase the succession duties on 
joersonal property, and to leave the smaller duties on landed 
property untouched, was especially attacked by Mr. Glad- 



IKGLAKD UKDEB GLADSTONE. 11 

stone. The exemption of land from succession duties 
had long been looked upon with fierce disfavor by the 
majority, who were not landholders. Mr. Gladstone point- 
ed out that while under the old arrangement the tradesman 
and the farmer paid three times as much succession duty 
as the landlord, by the new arrangement they would have 
to pay four times as much. 

Under such conditions, with shattered prestige and faded 
laurels, the Tory Government decided to make that ap- 
peal to the country which, one year earlier, might not have 
been made in vain. The more hopeful among the Liber- 
als rejoiced in the prospect of the struggle. Mr. Grissell, 
imprisoned in Newgate, for offense against the majesty of 
Parliament, rejoiced too, for the dissolution to him meant 
liberty. But it may be doubted whether there was much 
sense of rejoicing in many Tory bosoms. The more pru- 
dent among them must have regarded the election with 
doubt and dread. It is now certain that the Tory whips 
were much misled as to the prospects of the party, and that 
Lord Beaconsfield himself was unwittingly misled in con- 
sequence. However, the plunge was made. The Govern- 
ment hurriedly passed the Corrupt Practices at Elections 
Bill, which heightened the expense of elections by repealing 
the provision which made it illegal for candidates to pay 
the cost of carriages employed to bring voters to the poll. 
Then they went into the field and faced their enemies. 

The elections soon showed that the Conservative Minis- 
try had indeed outlived its popularity: election after elec- 
tion went in the Liberal interest, constituency after constit- 
uency declared in favor of a new Government and against 
the old, seat after seat changed from blue to buff. Never 
before in the history of the reign had a Ministry remained 
in power so long to fall from power so disastrously. When 
the elections were fairly over, the Liberals were found to 
have the largest majority on record in our time — a major- 
ity of one hundred and twenty. The reasons for this great 
victory were plain enough. There was the inevitable law 
of political reaction, which always makes a large number 
of persons vote on way because on the previous occasion 
they had voted another. There were the misfortunes of 
the Conservative Government: they had taxed the temper 
of the country very severely; their " imperial ^^ bubble, 
when swollen to its biggest, had been pricked and shattered 



12 ENGLAI^D UNDER GLADSTONE. 

by some liumiliating blunders and some bloody defeats;: 
most of all, there was the eloquence of Mr. Gladstone. 
Months before the ai^peal to the country he had made his 
famous Midlothian campaign^ pouring out speech after 
speech of scorn and contemi)t and invective against the 
Ministry; and every word he uttered was ca<rried to every 
corner of English land, and carried conviction along with 
it to some minds unconvinced before. The Midlothian 
speeches were brilliant — almost, it may be said, too brill- 
iant. Mr. Gladstone can hardly have counted upon carry- 
ing the country before him in the way he did when he 
poured forth speech after speech of glowing phrase and 
passionate denunciation. The speeches literally swept tlie 
Conservatives away; but it must be admitted that the oc- 
casional extravagance which lent them their value as artistic 
efforts, and perhaps even as jDolitical weapons, was often 
made the cause of considerable uneasiness to Mr. Gladstone 
when he was once again in office. The Midlothian speeches 
were a little like the famous memorial which Gil Bias drew 
up for that Count d^Olivarez whose melancholy face frowns 
from the canvas of Velasquez in the gallery of Madrid. It 
was the duty of Gil Bias to present the Spanish people with 
a very uni^leasant account of the management of affairs, 
under the previous Prime Minister, the Duke de LerDTi.a. 
'* It is necessary now," said the Count d^Olivarez, '•' to. 
bring before the eyes of court and town the wretched state 
to which the monarchy is reduced. A picture must be 
painted which shall imjDress the people, and jorevent them 
from regretting my predecessor.^^ Gil Bias, iit will be re- 
membered, acting u2)on these instructions, did paint a most 
alarming picture of the condition of the kingdom, with its 
finances dissipated, its revenues squandered, its marine' 
ruined, the very monarchy imperiled by the faults of' the- 
pi'evious ruler. After havijig drawn a sufficiently fearful 
representation of the evils which threatened the kingdom, 
Gil Bias proceeded to raise the hopes of the jieople by de- 
scribing the Count d^Olivarez as a reformer sent by 
Heaven- for the safety of the nation, and promised marvels 
in his name. It may be admitted by Mr. Glaclstojie^s 
warmest admirers that something of the spirit of Gil Bias 
lingered along the lines of the Midlothian speeches. But 
for the time they were completely successful; they stirred 
the country from end to end, and shook Lord Beaconsfield's 



El^GLAKD UKDER GLADSTOKE. 13 

government to its very center. When the elections came 
on, Mr. Gladstone went down into MidlotJiian again, of 
course, and made more sjDeeches, no less vigorous, no less 
impassioned, no less eloquent than their perdecessors; and 
once more they triumphed, not alone in Midlothian, but it 
might almost be said in every constituency which returned 
a Liberal candidate, certainly in every constituency which 
overturned a Tory representative and put a Liberal in his 
place. It would indeed be difficult to overestimate the 
effect of those Midlothian speeches upon the English 
people, and, in consequence, upon the Tory administration. 
It must be admitted, however, that their influence after- 
ward was in more than one case injurious to the Govern- 
ment they had called into power, and embarrassing to the 
statesman who uttered them. 

Some share of the victory was undoubtedly in many cases 
due to the influence and the assistance of the Irish vote. 
Lord Beaconsfield's letter to the Duke of Marlborough be- 
gan with a direct attack upon the Irish Nationalists, and 
the Irish Nationalists in the House of Commons retorted 
by calling upon the Irish voters everywhere to rally tothe 
Liberal standards, and lend a hand to hurl the Conserva- 
tives from office. The appeal was eagerly responded to; 
in almost every case the Irish vote was all but unanimously 
given to a Liberal candidate, and in not a few constituencies 
the Irish vote was big enough to turn the balance one way 
or the other. Undoubtedly the sympathies of the bulk of 
the Irish electors in England were on the whole with the 
Liberal leaders; but they were now for the first time obey- 
ing a call to vote for the Liberal party, not so much be- 
cause it was Liberal, as because it was not Tory. 

The Liberals once in power, the question then came up 
who was to be their leader. In the popular mind there 
was no doubt at all. Through all the struggle that had 
resulted in the Liberal triumph, one man was as conspic- 
uous on the Liberal side as Lord Beaconsfield was on the 
Tory side — the man who had been the peer and antagonist 
of Lord Beaconsfield for twenty years. Practically every 
one, friend or foe, felt that Mr. Gladstone was the choosen 
leader of the English Liberal party. But for a moment it 
seemed as if the great Liberal victory was to be followed 
by an absurd anticlimax. The great battle had been fought 
and won, and, lo! the wreath of laurel was to be placed 



14 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

upon the head, not of the conquering general, but of some 
respectable lieutenant, who had done his little share of the 
business very creditably along with half a score of others. 
It was hinted that Mr. Gladstone was unpopular at Court. 
Lord Hartington was sent for and invited to form a Minis- 
try. The eyes of all England were metaphorically upon 
Lord Hartington, as he walked in the drizzling rain from 
Windsor Station to Windsor Castle in obedience to the royal 
summons, and walked back again, still in the rain, having 
declined to accept the responsibility of forming a Ministry. 
Lord Hartington may not unreasonably be accused of polit- 
ical ambition, for he has devoted himself with a patient 
persistence to a political life that must, it may be well im- 
agined, have been exceedingly uncongenial, has conquered 
many difficulties and many defects, and has succeeded in 
earning distinction, and in marking out for himself a 
career. It spoke well for his ability to play the part of a 
statesman that he was able to refuse the temptation to be- 
come Prime Minister, to see that a Hartington administra- 
tion was not what the country was just then calling for. 
Lord Hartington being out of the question, the Queen sent 
for Lord Granville. Lord Granville, in all his long polit- 
ical career, had never been Prime Minister. In 1855 he 
had tried, and failed, to form a Ministry.* Lord Granville 
was an able man who might in other times, and under 
other conditions, have made an excellent Premier. His 
sweet intellectual nature, his long political experience, his 
exquisite facility for understanding men and questions — all 
combined to make him an admirable candidate for the 
first office of the State. Sir Henry Taylor in his essay on 
" The Statesman," urges the importance of general knowl- 
edge, * ^ if it were only to enable the statesman to 
escape the charge of general ignorance which men, j^erhaps 
more generally ignorant themselves, but armed with a 
specific knowledge, may otherwise be led to advance.'^ 
Lord Granville's statesmanship was of a kind which would 
deserve the approval of Sir Henry Taylor. He is one of 
the most cultured of statesmen; he is what the Prince 
Consort was, and what the late Lord Brougham wished to 
be, a man who excels in many branches of knowledge. 
Sharp, the Abolitionist, thought he had discovered in the 
great Napoleon the verification of the prophecy of the Little 
Horn in Daniel, and he tried to communicate his theory to 



ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 15 

Pox. " Would you believe it?"*^ exclaimed tlie indig- 
nant Abolitionist to a friend after the interview. ** He did 
not so much as know what the Little Horn was. " 

It would, probably, not be easy to find a subject — even 
the Little Horn — about which Lord Granville did not know 
something. Indeed, at one time Lord Granville was 
thought to be almost too cultured to find himself at home 
in the rough field of practical politics. The impression 
was a mistaken one. In one of Eugene Sue^s stories there 
is a slender, delicate young man, so slender and delicate 
that he can easily pass in feminine garb for a woman; and 
yet, in moments of danger, he displays tremendous 
strength, and fells practiced bullies and bruisers to the 
ground with the ease of Ajax. Like Sue^s hero. Lord 
Granville seemed too delicate, too gracious for the rough- 
and-ready business of parliamentary life; but he soon showed 
that, at the right time, he had as strong a grip, and could 
hit as hard, as the best. Just now we seem to have passed 
away from that order of things in which exceedingly yoimg 
men played the parts of Prime Ministers and leaders of Op- 
23osition. Our statesmen now are, for the most part, elder- 
ly. Lord Beaconsfield's brilliant saying about the world 
being made by young men, would not hold good at all were 
it not for Lord Kandolph Churchill. But among elderly 
statesmen Lord Granville is conspicuous for his youth. 
Some years ago, speaking of his youthful days, he prettily 
said, ** No one ever was so young as I was once.^^ Some- 
thing of this air of unparalleled youth still clings about 
Lord Granville, and makes people feel that, if he has not 
yet been Prime Minister, there is still plenty of time. Lord 
Granville is certainly of the stuff from which Prime Minis- 
ters are made, and well made. But in the early spring of 
1880, it was obvious that there was only one possible Prime 
Minister, and that he was not Lord Granville. The inevi- 
table had to be accepted; the inexorable was not to be 
argued with. 

The task which lay before the new Premier was not over- 
easy. Had it been in his power to form a Ministry three 
times the size of that which custom and precedent permit- 
ted, he would have found it difficult to satisfy the crowd of 
politicians who thought themselves entitled to take office. 
There were, to begin with, a certain number of men who 
must obviously be included in any ministerial scheme that 



16 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 



/ 



could possibly be formulated; men whose commanding 
position in the party, or whose signal services in former 
days, gave them the right to belong to the new Govern- 
ment. The names of Lord Hartington, Lord Granville, 
Sir William Harcourt, Mr. Bright, and others, leaped at 
once to the lips of every man in England who planned out 
— as who did not? — the personnel of the embryo Ministry. 
Then there were men who had been in office before, and 
who seemed to think that they had a sort of prescriptive 
right to some position in the new Ministry. These were 
often respectable fourth and fifth class men of average ves- 
try abilit}^, but who had given their full parochial measure 
on former occasions, and were not worth trying again. 
Then there were the 7iovi Jwmines, the new men who had 
come j)rominently to the front during the long years of op- 
position, the free-lances from below the gangway who had 
marked themselves out as candidates for office whenever 
the Liberals should sit on the right hand of Mr. Speaker 
again. Sk Charles Dilke, Mr. Chamberlain, Mr. Leonard 
Courtney, Mr. Fawcett, Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice — these 
were among the most conspicuous of these free companions. 
From all these various elements a Ministry had to be com- 
bined and a Cabinet evolved. The task was neither light 
nor pleasant. A satiric poet, a Juvenal or a Churchill, 
might have found excellent material for pungent and piti- 
less raillery in the struggles, the intrigues, the heart-burn- 
ings, the hatreds, the jealousies and the despairs, the 
hopes and fears that animated the breasts of all the mob 
of candidates for each and every place that it was in Mr. 
Gladstone's joower to bestow. Some politicians who were 
well known to have little love for Mr. Gladstone — who had, 
indeed, openly avowed that they would never again consent 
to take office under him — found the winter of their discon- 
tent melting away under the glorious summer of success, 
and showed themselves willing to waive their objections and 
enroll themselves once more beneath Mr. Gladstone's ban- 
ner. 

At first the process of Cabinet-making went smoothly 
ejiough. There was no difficulty in assigning the most im- 
portant offices to the most obvious men. Lord Granville, 
Lord Hartington, Lord Northbrook, Lord Selborne, Mr. 
Childers, and Mr. Forster were easily apportioned off. Then 
came the critical question of the Radical strength. The 



EKGLAi^D UKDER GLADSTONE. 17 

Whigs, as a matter of coarse, did not like the idea of any 
Radical element being allowed to mix in the composition 
of the Cabinet. For them Mr. Bright, Mr. Forster, and 
Mr. Gladstone himself were quite revolutionary enough, 
and they wished to have nothing to do with the fiery spirits 
below the gangway. Even Mr. Gladstone, while ready to 
recognize the Radicals by giving them places in the Minis- 
try, was said to be unwilling to allow men, as yet untried 
in office, to enter the Cabinet at once. But the Radicals 
were determined to have a representative in the Cabinet. 
Their leaders made a resolute stand. Some one of their 
number — it did not much matter which, but some promi- 
nent Radical — must have a place in the hqw Cabinet, or 
they would know the reason why. They had a perfect right 
to make this demand, and to take their stand upon it. In 
the years that had elapsed since Mr. Gladstone went out of 
office, in 1874, Radicalism had been growing more and 
more powerful every day. In Scotland, in the north of 
England, especially. Radicalism, and not Liberalism, was 
the antagonist of Conservatism. The Radicals of Birming- 
ham, of Manchester, of ISTewcastle-on-Tyne, and all the 
great towns of the north, had learned to organize, had be- 
come, by organization, the most powerful body of opinion 
in the country. Of these men Mr. Chamberlain was the 
chosen captain. Sir Charles Dilke was the champion in 
especial of the Radical working-men of London. One or 
other of these two must be given a seat in the Cabinet; so 
the Radical fiat had gone forth, and Mr. Gladstone could 
not, had he been inclined, have aiforded to disregard that 
fiat. The idle gossip of the hour, the many-tongued rumor 
than ran during those eventful weeks through club-rooms 
and drawing-rooms and editors^ rooms, said that Sir Charles 
Dilke and Mr. Chamberlain had joine^i their fortunes, had 
packed cards together, and had entered into a solemn league 
with a seat in the Cabinet for its object, and that each was 
pledged to support, with all the strength of his influence 
and his following, the one who should be chosen. Whether 
this were so or not, the strong voice of Radicalism had de- 
clared that one of its two chiefs should be chosen, and 
liadicalism was likely to have its way. 

Sir Charles Dilke declined to accept any office unless 
some representative of the Radical members below the 
gangway found his way into the Cabinet. He himself 



18 EI^GLAKD UKDER GLADSTONE. 

suggested Mr. Chamberlain, as a man'wliom all the Katli- 
(^als would be glad to see chosen. There was a distinct 
pause in tlie process of formation. Conference after con- 
ference was held; at the clubs intense excitement pre- 
vailed; rumor after rumor, in turn, took possession of the 
public mind. The excitement was well warranted. The 
situation almost deserved the dignity of a constitutional 
crisis. Were the Radical party already strong enough with 
the country to be able to dictate to a Ministry and demand 
a 23lace in the Cabinet? It was soon shown that they were. 
After some eventful days of expectancy and much going to 
and fro of embassadors from the two camps, it became 
known that the Radicals had carried their j)oint, and that 
Mr. Gladstone had accepted the situation and offered Mr. 
Chamberlain a seat in the Cabinet. It was judged wiser 
to risk oilending the Whigs than to reject the Radicals. 

At last, in the end of April, the Cabinet was formed and 
the Ministry com23leted; so many ambitions had been 
gratified, so many encouraged, so many more had been 
frustrated. Mr. Gladstone took the two officers of the 
First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Ex- 
chequer. The Great Seal and the Lord High Chancellorship 
were intrusted to Lord Selborne. Lord Granville became 
Foreign Secretary, Sir William Harcourt became Home 
Secretary, Lord Hartington became Secretary for India, 
Mr. Childers went to the War Office, Lord Kimberley un- 
dertook the affairs of the Colonies, Mr. Bright accepted the 
Chancellorship of the Duchy of Lancaster, Mr. Forster 
was made Chief Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant, Mr. 
Chamberlain represented Radicalism in the Cabinet as 
President of the Board of Trade. The Duke of Argyll as 
Privy Seal, Mr. Dodson as President of the Local Govern- 
ment Board, and Lord Spencer as Lord President of the 
Council completed the roll of the Cabinet. 

Outside the Cabinet, the most important members of the 
Ministry were Sir Charles Dilke as Under Secretary for 
Foreign Affairs, Mr. Fawcett as Postmaster-General, and 
Si]' Henry James as Attorney-General. Mr. Grant Duff, a 
jiolitician of brilliant promise and scant performance, of 
wide information which he seemed unable to turn to much 
account, of abilities which would have made the fortunes 
of half a dozen other men and of which he made little 
enough, was Under Secretary for the Colonies. Mr. 



EHGLAl^TD UKBEE GLADSTONE. 1§ 

Adam, who had long been famous for his services as Whip 
to the Liberal party, sought rest in. the Department of 
Public Works, only to weary soon enough of what he 
called " looking after flower-pots;^^ and, after seeking 
once more fit service for his energies in the administration 
of Madras, to die a too early death. Mr. Shaw Lefevre, 
-an able politician, who knew something more about land 
tenure than most people, and was valued accordingly, be- 
came Secretary to the Admiralty; Sir Farrer Herschell was 
Solicitor-General. Mr. MundeUa undertook the education, 
department as Vice-President of the Council. One man, 
whose name was conspicuously absent from the composition 
of the new Ministry, Mr. Stansfeld, was absent, not by 
omission, but by his own choice. His former services in- 
cluded him in the list of those to whom proffer of some 
place is inevitable; but the condition of his health did not 
allow him to enter once more into the harness of office. 
He remained outside the Ministry, and the Governmont, as 
some sign of recognition of his ability and his claims upon 
their consideration, afterward nominated him as a member 
of an important commission to inquire into the working of 
the English land system. 

Elevation to the peerage consoled, or was expected to 
console, some statesmen whom, for various reasons, it was 
not convenient to include in the Cabinet, or even in the 
Ministry. Eoremost among these was Mr. Lowe, who was 
sent to the Upper House under the title of Lord Sher- 
brooke. Mr. Lowe was a man of splendid gifts, profound- 
ly cultured, a brilliant and bitter speaker, of wide and 
original ideas; but he was not a man whom it was easy for 
any statesman, or any body of statesmen, to get on with. 
He was not to be relied on as an invariable supporter of his 
chief; he was crotchety, even eccentric, in some of his 
views; and he was incapable of 'sacrificing his own opin- 
ions, or abandoning his own ideas, to any one. So his 
fiery light was allowed to shine fitfully in the House of 
Lords — very fitfully and faintly indeed, for Lord Sher- 
brooke appeared to find the company of the Peers oppress- 
ive, and seldom roused himself to address them. Another 
and a very different man, for whom a seat was found on 
the scarlet benches, was Mr. Knatchbull-Hugessen, now 
Lord Brabourne. Mr. KnatchbullrHugessen had earned 
some deserved distinction outside the House of Commons 



so ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE, 

as a writer of very graceful and pretty fairy stories for 
children; inside the House of Commous he had not made 
himself very conspicuous. He would, it was said, have 
much preferred a place in the Ministry to a peerage; but 
he had to take the peerage. He was afterward accused of 
being ungrateful for the gift, of going out of his way, as 
Lord Brabourne, to attack the Chief he had served as Mr. 
Knatchbull-Hugessen. A silly squabble arose much later 
in the journals as to whether Lord Brabourne had or had 
not bound himself to Mr. Gladstone by ostentatious place- 
hunting. One who jorofessed to know, writing under the 
name of an '* Old AVhip,^' said he had. Lord" Brabourne 
fiercely retaliated that he had not. In the end the *' Old 
AYhip " apologized. It was made clear that Lord Bra- 
bourne had not rashly committed himself in writing. He 
had been made a peer; but a man is not supposed to owe 
any servile gratitude to the Minister who gives him a title, 
at least not since the days of Sir Eobert Walioole. But 
Lord Brabourne did undoubtedly become, to the best of his 
ability, a somewhat hostile critic of Mr. Gladstone's jDolicy. 
If any reasons other than honest conviction need be sought 
for, perhaps being shouldered out of the Ministry into the 
House of Lords might afford an explanation. Mr. Knatch- 
bull-Hugessen thought he was a statesman, and statesmen 
have not, nowadays, a very distinguished part to play in 
the Peers' Chamber. 



CHAPTER IL 

THE NEW MEN. 

The Prime Minister who had just triumphantly returned 
to power might well be pardoned for a little human exulta- 
tion over his victory. Six years before, acting on an im- 
pulse of political pique, he had dissolved Parliament and 
fallen hopelessly into minority and the cold shiides of Op- 
position. Not long before the election '* Punch " had a 
cartoon representing Mr. Gladstone as a jockey urging his 
horse over the dangerous and difficult fence of the Irish 
University Bill. When the rejection of the measure had 
practically decided the fate of the Ministry, "Punch'' 
completed its allegory by Another cartoon, in which the 
horse and its rider lay thrown and prone on the other side 



E2S'GLAND UKDER GLADSTONE. ^1 

of the liedge, with the legend *^ Come a cropper/^ Mr. 
Gladstone had indeed come a cropper. There is a story 
told in some of the Indian mythologies of one of the gods 
who was flung by some superior deity so high into heayen 
that though he has been falling down to earth ever since, 
he has neyer yet come back again. Conversely/ Mr. Glad- 
stone was hurled so far down into the abyss of defeat that 
for a time it seemed' as if he would never scale his way to 
the upper air and behold the stars again. For awhile he 
still remained leader of the Opposition. Then he suddenly 
took it into his head to retire in a measure from public life. 
He had got involved in a theological discussion with Cardi- 
nal Newman; all the fiery impetuosity of liis nature ap- 
peared to be wholly wrapped up in the questions of Catholic 
and Portestant dogma; he announced that he would no 
longer lead the Opposition in the House of Commons. 
Some younger man must be found for that duty. His fol- 
lowers tried in vain to dissuade him; and then the younger 
man was found in the person of Lord Hartington. The 
career of the eldest son of the Duke of Devonshire is a re- 
markable instance of what dogged determination to succeed 
in an ungrateful task may accomplish. A Eoman gentle- 
man of the pre-Csesarian period, were he as wild as Cati- 
line and his companions, was sure to take a hand in the 
great game of politics. Milo was eager for his consulship; 
Olodius took at least as much trouble to get his prsetorship 
as to slip in among the women at the Bona Dea cere- 
mony. The young patricians of the age of Anne and her 
Hanoverian successors took as kindly to politics as to horse- 
racing and dueling and beating the watch and making the 
" grand tour."*^ But, unless popular impression was even 
more mistaken than usual. Lord Hartington did not take 
kindly to politics or to political life. He had his own ideas 
of enjoyment; he was very fond of horses and theaters aud 
other bi'ight and lively pleasures; and he found, it was con- 
fidently asserted, the business of political life a dreadful 
bore. No sign of this whispered weariness was ever shown 
in Lord Hartington' s political career. He entered Parlia- 
ment very young; he was early put into the service of the 
State. Long before any minister dreamed of offering a 
place in his ministry to Mr. Bright, Lord Hartington had 
served his apprenticeship in the routine of office. A hard 
apprenticeship it must have been. Lord Hartington would 



22 Ei^GLAND UJS^DEil GLADSTONE. 

have been infinitely ha^jpier, no doubt, if he could have 
passed his time in his own way in more congenial pursuits 
than in reading blue-books, and addressing Mr. Speaker. 
But he was the son of a great Whig Duke, and the polit: 
ical Parcge liad decided that he must play a jjart in the 
statesmanship of England. He set to work to learn his 
lesson with the same unswerving perseverance that he would 
no doubt have shown if he had been called upon in duty to 
his house to become a soldier, or a sailor, or a divine. For 
a long time he did not seem to possess any capacity for 
political life. beyond patience. He was put through grade 
after grade of ministerial office, without manifesting more 
ability than nine out of every ten members of the House of 
Commons would have shown in his place. He was not at 
first, nor for long enough, even a moderately good speaker. 
But he had patience, and he had determination. Steady 
practice gave him in the end a certain distinct gift of 
speech, not indeed eloquence, or pretending to eloquence, 
but a debating facility that of late has approached to excel- 
lence in its kind. Long, however, before he had shown 
any skill as a politician, he had been looked upon as a 
future leader of the Liberal party, because, whatever his 
merits or defects as a statesman, he was the heir of the 
Duke of Devonshire. But in 1874 he had already shown 
sufficient signs of caj^acity to justify his party in choosing 
him as their leader, even if he had more possible rivals in 
the field than either Mr. Forster or Mr. Lowe. Lord 
Hartington became accordingly the leader of the Liberal 
Opposition in the House of Commons, and led it very well. 
His position was not altogether an easy one. Mr. Glad- 
stone, in spite of his proclaimed retirement from the fervid 
course of politics, in spite of his apparent absorption in 
theological argumentation, was not altogether a Hierony- 
mus in Bethlehem. He came out of his monastic retreat 
occasionally; he laid down the Fathers and took up the 
blue-books; he was scarcely less in the House of Commons 
than of old, and he very often forgot that he had abdicated 
the i^ost of leader of the Liberal party. Few things are 
more embarrassing to the leader of a party than the unex- 
pected interference of an older and more influential politi- 
cian than himself; and of this embarrassment Lord Har- 
tington had his full share during the term of his captaincy. 
It soon became recognized that Mr. Gladstone had by no 



EINTGLAITD UKDER GLADSTONE. 23 

means gone into the wilderness; that questions of foreign 
and domestic polity were still to the full as interesting for 
him as the subtilest arguments deducible from the Council 
of Mcsea, or the weakest points in the polemical armor of 
the Angelic Doctor; that^, in fact, Mr. Gladstone was still 
actually, if not nominally, the leader of the Liberal party. 
He gave very good proof of his leadership at the time when 
the Beaconsfield Ministry was declining to its fall, drifting 
from peace and honor to dispeace in Afghanistan and dis- 
honor in South Africa. Mr. Gladstone made the famous 
Midlothian campaign. He went from town to town 
speaking against the Government with all his old eloquence 
and more than his old success. " The pit rose at me,"^ a 
great actor once exclaimed, exulting on the conclusion of 
some great night of triumph. The country literally '' rose 
at^^ Mr. Gladstone. Wherever he went he was greeted 
with enthusiasm, with homage, with acclamation. Six 
years before, when he talked in the . driving rain to his 
Greenwich electors, and, emulating the swan who dies in 
singing, composed his playful verses about the Straits of 
Malacca, most persons thought he had touched his zenith; 
he appeared to have reached his nadir a few years later, 
when he was hustled by a gang of jingo rowdies in Caven- 
dish Square, and had to take refuge— he and his wife — 
from their brutal violence in the house of his friend Dr., 
now Sir Andrew, Clarke. The Midlothian camjoaign 
seemed to show that every one was wrong, that Mr. Glad- 
stone had never been so popular before; the general election 
made ifc certain. 

The most remarkable thing connected with the new 
Ministry was the way in which the Liberal inqiiette had 
been strengthened by an infusion of Eadical grape-juice. 
The men below the gangway were represented by Mr. 
Chamberlain in the Cabinet, and Sir Charles Dilke and 
Mr. Leonard Courtney in the Ministry. Mr. Chamberlain 
was a remarkable type of the advanced Eadical. He 
represented Birmingham in company with Mr. Bright, 
who had at one time seemed so terrible a reformer in the 
eyes of the steady-going politician, but whose Eadicalism 
showed wan and pale indeed by the side of the stronger 
color of Mr. Chamberlain" s ideas. Indeed, of late, Mr. 
Bright appeared little better than a Conservative by the 
side of the fiery young men and advanced middle-aged men 



24 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

who were guiding Liberal opinion in all directions, and 
who were now climbing into the Ministry; actually creep- 
ing into the saci-ed core of the Cabinet itself to frighten 
AVhig dukes with their north-country ideas and their trans- 
atlantic democracy. Most of the real political strength 
of England lies now in the sturdy nortliern manufacturing 
toTVTis, which only came into political existence with the 
Reform Bill of 1832; and Mr. Ohamberlahi was the recog- 
nized exponent of north-country opinion. 

Mr. Chamberlain M^as not, in the strictest sense, a yery 
young man when he first began to count as an influence in 
politics. He was born in 1836. He may be said roughly 
to have floated, into the ken of those who watch the polit- 
ical heavens for the appearance of any new planet, in 1874, 
^v^hen he retired from the business in which he made a 
fortune, and Avas for the first time of three successive times 
elected Maj'Or of Birmingham. He was forty years old 
hefore he first entei*ed Parliament in the June of 1876, but 
in our time and with our notions a man of forty is a mere 
boy in political life, with practically all his career before 
him. The difference between politics and almost every 
other human pursuit is one that lends a special attraction 
to politics. At an age when a man in art of any kind 
ho]3es to have made himself a name and reputation, or in 
commerce has at least dreamed of retiring into private life 
and enjoying the fruit of his labors, he finds himself fitted 
to begin the game of politics from the beginning with as 
fair a chance as if he were a boy of twenty. No man be- 
comes a poet or a painter who has passed his third decade 
without shaping a sonnet or sketching a hay-stack. Nor, 
except in the rarest cases, does the merchant or the trades- 
man who has devoted some twenty years of manhood to 
one branch of commerce turn on the mid pathway of his 
life to essay some other. Few men '* wait till they come 
to forty years'^ to become soldiers or sailors, or to enter 
the Church, or to study for the Bar. But in pohtics, in 
parliamentary life, the middle-aged man almost realizes 
the wish of the hero of Oliver Wendell Holmes' pathetic 
little poem, and becomes a boy again, and goes to school 
with at least the possibihty of winning many prizes, and of 
climbing to the head of his form. Mere youth has, per- 
haps, never been of so little value as in the successive par- 
liaments of the Victorian age. Perhaps it would be fairer 



ENGLAND UKBER GLADSTONE* ^5 

to say that the term Youth has never received a more hb- 
eral interpretation. Mr. Chamberlain, the successful Bir- 
mingham manufacturer, with one career behind him, entered 
Parliament to renew his youth, and to find a new and far 
greater career before him. Mr. Chamberlain's appear- 
ance, and something in Mr. Chamberlain's character, fos- 
tered the general feeling of his youth. William of Orange 
was said never to have been young, and to have sat at 
eighteen among the fathers of the Commonwealth seem- 
ingly as old as the oldest among them. Mr. Chamberlain, 
on the other hand, seems to have something of perennial 
youth about him. He sits among the fathers of the Com- 
monwealth with a quiet air of juvenility which recalls the 
Arcadian days of Prime Ministers of one-and-twenty, and 
youthful . politicians smuggled surreptitiously into the 
House before they had even attained their majority. His 
face is young; there is a youthful neatness in his attire, a 
youthful pride in the rare flowers that bloom in his button- 
hole, a youthful heat and impetuosity occasionally; all of 
which combine together to bid defiance to time. For with 
all his shrewdness and his face — and Mr. Chamberlain is 
one of the shrewdest as well as one of the ablest of living- 
statesmen — he has occasionally given way to imjoulses of 
joassion which seem strangely out of accord ' with his habit- 
ual grave demeanor. Before he ever entered the House of 
Commons he made a famous attack upon Mr. Disraeli, in 
which he accused him of mendacity with a bluntness that 
is not habitual in English political discussion. For this, 
however, he afterward apologized very much as Lord Dur- 
ham once apologized for a fierce attack he had made upon 
the Bishop of Exeter. Like Lord Durham, Mr. Chamber- 
lain had been tortured by domestic loss. Those who most 
regretted the attack admitted that the apology only did Mr. 
Chamberlain honor, and it may be not unsafely assumed 
that the object of the attack was the very last to bear it in 
uncharitable memory. 

Once again, after Mr. Chamberlain had been for some 
time a member of the House, he allowed himself, in a 
moment of political passion, to break through his self-con- 
trol, this time to the horror of the graver and more solemn 
members of his own party. It was during a memorable 
night of the memorable flogging debates of the last Parlia- 
ment. Lord Hartington, then leader of the Liberal 



26 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

023position, was not going as far against the Government 
as some of his nominal followers below the gangway 
thought that he ought to go. Mr. Chamberlain jumped 
to his feet, and in an angry speech spoke of Lord Harting- 
ton as the "late leader of the Liberal party. ^' The 
speech, and the attitude of Mr. Chamberlain^ s companions, 
had the etfect of bringing Lord Hartington to take up the 
line of action desired below the gangway, but its effects 
upon the minds of respectable Whigs may be easily im- 
agined. ]N"o doubt that it rankled in many Whig minds 
wlien the Whig Liberals did then- best in 1880 to keep the 
sjieaker out of the Cabinet. 

During the comparatively short time in which Mr. 
Chamberlain has been ^prominently before the world he 
has certainly succeeded in winning for himself a very re- 
markable position. There is a story told of him that once, 
some few years ago, when he was traveling in Iceland 
with a brother Radical, who was also a brother member, he 
got into talk with a school-master in one of the small Ice- 
landic towns. The school-master displayed a considerable 
knowledge of English political life, and observed that there 
was one rising politician whose career he was following 
with great attention: could the travelers tell- him anything 
about this man? his name was Joseph Chamberlain. The 
story is a fair illustration of the way in which Mr. Cham- 
berlain has succeeded in identifying himself with the pur- 
poses and the aspirations of the Radical party. Swift once 
said of Bolingbroke that he wanted something of the alder- 
man to be a successful statesman. Something of the alder- 
man, using the word in its best sense, in the sense which 
made an Athenian archon proud of his archonship, there is 
in the character of Mr. Chamberlain. It is the presence 
of this quality, this almost Hellenic feeling of love for " the 
city,^' which won his way in Birmingham, and raised him 
to the leadership of English Radicalishi. Ambitious, 
masterful, profoundly politic, occasionally impulsive, he 
is at the present moment one of the most interesting as 
well as one of the most gifted of English representatives. 

When Lord Beaconsfield, out of office, solaced himself 
by publishing '* Endymion,^^ he made one of his charac- 
ters, Waldershare, become Under Secretary for Foreign 
Affairs, with a chief in the House of Lords. Waldershare 
declares that in these conditions he is " master of the situ- 



ENGLAND UNDEK GLADSTONE. 27 

ation; " and lie is anxious to form a gallery of the portraits 
of all the great men who in their time had been Under 
Secretaries for Foreign Affairs, with chiefs among the 
peers. There could be no doubt as to whom Lord Beacons- 
field had in his mind when he wrote those lines. Sir 
Charles Dilke had just become Under Secretary for Foreign 
Affairs; he had a chief in the Upper House, and he was 
certainly '^master of the situation.^" Sir Charles Dilke 
was obviously pleased to be Secretary of State, and he 
played the part with all the enjoyment with which Sulpice 
Vaudrey, in Jules Claretie^s clever novel, " M. le Minis- 
tre,''^ enjoyed the sensation of finding himself Minister of 
the Interior. Not quite ten years before Sir Charles Dilke 
had been one of the best-abused men in England. He was 
an open and avowed Eepublican. Eepublicanism is not an 
ungraceful addition to the attractions of a clever young 
politician with a comfortable income. The well-to-do Ee- 
publican can assume to himself all the picturesqueness of a 
Oamille Desmoulins, or a fiery, intrepid St. Just, without 
incurring the slightest suspicion of being spurred into a 
democracy by a desire for a livelihood. Eabagas is a 
rowdy who haunts humble cabarets, but the Phrygian cap 
of liberty sits becomingly enough on the forehead of Lord 
Magnus Charters, and Eepublicanism with ten thousand a 
year generally ceases to be obnoxious. Yet Sir Charles 
Dilke succeeded in making his Eepublicanism and himself 
exceedingly obnoxious to a very large number of people. 
It was not that Sir Charles Dilke ^s Eepublicanism was so 
very red; it was red rather by contrast than sanguine-hued 
of set purpose. But when Sir Charles Dilke first came 
prominently into public notice, the rise and fall of the 
Paris Commune had frightened a good many people in 
England into alarm at any kind of democratic agitation. 
There had been a decided growth of Eepublican feeling in 
England before the Commune; there was an equally decid- 
ed reaction and falling off after the Commune. 

Sir Charles Dilke had made himself conspicuous by going 
about the country and delivering stirring speeches of a 
more or less Eepublican kind, and attacking the way in 
which the income and allowances of the Crown were s|)ent. 
There were generally rows, and occasionally broken heads, 
at his meetings, and he was called *' citizen Dilke, ^^ and 
made fun of in theaters and by newspapers, and was de- 



28 EITGLAKD UNDER GLADSTOKE. 

nounced in drawing-rooms, and worshiped in working- 
men's clubs. His opponents practically challenged him to 
repeat in the House of Commons what he had been saying 
in the country, and he at once accepted the challenge. In 
March, 1872, he brought forward a motion in the House 
of Commons for inquiring into the way in which the money 
of the Crown was spent. Sir Charles Dilke said what he 
had to say quietly and composedly, and the House listened 
to him with wonder and anger, and he was replied to "very 
bitterly by Mr. Gladstone. The Prime Minister brought 
all the force of his eloquence and his inyective to bear upon 
the young member. He attacked him with as much bitter- 
ness as Walpole could have used to some Jacobite Shippen, 
scheming to overthrow the monarchy altogether. He 
seemed to point him .out to the House and to the country 
as an object of scorn and indignation. When he sat down, 
leaving the object of his assault apjoarently alone and with- 
out a friend, Mr. Auberon Herbert rose. Mr. Auberon 
Herbert was a young politician of good family and ad- 
vanced ideas, to whom at ordinary times the House was 
prepared to listen; but it was not 23re23ared now to listen to 
what Mr. Auberon Herbert had to say, for Mr. Herbert 
had risen to support Sir Charles Dilke, and to avow him- 
self, too, as a Eepublican. The House of Commons lost 
its head completely; it howled ,and yelled, and shouted at 
Mr. Herbert. The long-forgotten cockcrow rang its shrill 
clarion through the din of the chamber, making itself audi- 
ble above the bellowings of respectable country members, 
and the shrieks of startled supporters of the Ministry. Mr. 
Herbert held his ground, but he could not obtain a hear- 
ing. The Speaker, usually so authoritative, could not calm 
the House; his ajDpeals for order w^ere as vain as the king- 
ship of Knut against the waves of the Channel, or the mop 
of Mrs. Partington against the waters of the Atlantic, 

That night Sir Charles Dilke 's uniDopularity reached its 
height; from that night he began slowly but surely to be- 
come popular once more. He never put himself forward 
again so markedly as a Republican, and he gradually be- 
came a favorite among those politicians who like, with 
Zenobia, to know rising young men who will probably be- 
come Cabinet muiisters. At the very time when Sir 
Charles Dilke was most unpopular, in those March days of 
1872, a political observer predicted that in ten years Sir 



ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 29 

Charles Dilke would be an under-secretary. The predic- 
tion overleaped its time; in eight years Sir Charles DHke 
was in a Ministry; in ten years he was destined to be in the 
Cabinet. In opposition Sir Charles Dilke distinguished 
himself especially by his profound knowledge of foreign 
politics. He let Republicanism alone for the time. Some 
people said that he found that Liberty's red night-cap could 
be worn just as well under the arm, like a crush-hat, as 
plucked defiantly forward upon the forehead. In reality, 
no doubt, Sir Charles Dilke saw that the time was not 
come for revolutionary display; that the democratic cause 
.advanced best in England by being left to itself. No one 
was surprised when Sir Charles Dilke became a member of 
the Gladstone Ministry; one or two were surprised that he 
consented to remain out of the Cabinet. 

Of Mr. Bright, as of Mr. Gladstone himself, it is not 
necessary to say much. It is curious, however, to note the 
difference that time had made in his political position since 
the days when he first took office as President of the Board 
of Trade ,in 1868. Then Mr. Bright was looked upon as 
an extremely advanced politician, whom it was at least 
venturesome, if not reckless, to admit into a Cabinet. In 
the twelve years that had gone by the tone of English Rad- 
icalism had altered greatly. • The Radicalism of 1868 was 
but the Liberalism, even the Whiggism, of 1880. Mr. 
Bright, indeed, had never been by nature a very Radical 
politician. He was much less of a Radical than his friend 
Cobden, for example. He had become associated with 
some great measures of reform, which were far in advance 
of the general political feeling of the time in which they 
were introduced. But he was very far from being aii ad- 
vanced Radical, or from being in sympathy with advanced 
Radical projects which involved great changes. There was 
always a very strong Conservative element in Mr. Bright's 
nature, even in the da.ys when he was denounced by his op- 
ponents as a revolutionary demagogue. Now, however, 
his place in a Liberal Cabinet seemed reasonable; no one 
felt any alarm about that. It was the younger men, the 
advanced Radicals, the Chamberlains and Dilkes, who were 
stirring up public action and party alarms by their ad- 
vances upon a Cabinet where Mr. Bri^-ht's presence was, if 
anything, regarded as a pledge of safety against the im- 
petuosity of youthful and ardent Radicalism. 



30 EN'GLAND UlfDEK GLADSTOKE. 

Mr. Fawcett was one of the most remarkable men in tlie 
Administration. Weighted at the very beginning of iiis 
manhood by a misfortune that might well have paralyzed 
his hopes and withered his ambition, he met his calamity 
with a i^atient resolution which may fitly be called heroic. 
He made up his mind to go on in the career he had marked 
out for himself in spite of his terrible affliction. He was 
fortunate hideed in having the worldly means which allowed 
him to pursue without privation^ and without the anxiety 
of poverty, the path he had chosen in the days before his 
darkness. But he was still more fortunate in the posses- 
sion of a mind strong with that proud patience which the 
gods are said to love — calm, fixed, and resolute. He met 
one of the deejDCst misfortinies that can befall any man 
with a lofty resignation, but he did not resign himself to 
despair or to inaction; he determined still to live an active 
and a useful life, and he kept his purpose well. Before he 
entered the House of Commons he had won an honorable 
name as a political economist. In the House of Commons 
he soon rose to eminence; his inflexible independence of 
thought prevented him from ever becoming that poorest of 
political creations, the mere party man. His leaders soon 
learned that they could never count ujDon passive obedience 
or tacit submission from his eager and energetic spirit; his 
mouth always sjDoke from the fullness of his heart; he was 
always on the side of what he believed to be honest and just 
and honorable, without a thought as to the result of his at- 
titude upon the temper of a minister or the numbers of a 
division lobby. On Indian affairs, in the complex ramifica- 
tions of Indian finance, he showed himself to be an especial 
master. Long before Mr. Tawcett entered the House of 
Commons the days had gone by when all debates on Indian 
aft'airs were conducted by a few officials and one or two 
specialists or crotcheteers in a deserted chamber. Debates 
on India had come to command universal attention; men 
of all parties and moods made it their business to study 
India and harangue on Indian questions. Among the best- 
informed of these Mr. Fawcett soon rose to distinction; but 
he never became, as many men have become, so fascinated 
by the wealth and variety of subjects which are included in 
the one word " India'' as to lose his interest in, or his 
grasp over, other tojDics. Conspicuous for his variety of 
information on Indian questions, even among Indian spe- 



JlNGLAKD tJNiDER GLADSTONE. 31 

cialists^ he never became a mere specialist himself^ never 
became absorbed in one set of political problems to tbe ex- 
clusion of all others. When it was made known^ therefore, 
in 1880, that Mr. Fawcett had been chosen to fill the office 
of Postmaster- General, most persons felt that a good choice 
had been made, and that Mr. Fawcett would find himself 
as much at home in the Post-Office as he had been in the 
chair of Political Economy in Cambridge. But it may be 
confidently asserted that no one, even of Mr. Fawcett "s 
warmest admirers and closest friends, could have expected 
that he would win the signal success which he has won in 
the first office that he ever filled under the Crown. 

The new Home Secretary was not the most popular 
member of the new Government, even with his own party. 
His ability was unquestioned, but certainly not his sincerity. 
People charged him with want of political morality; hinted 
that he fought neither for principle nor for party, but 
solely for himself; that he was the adventurer of adminis- 
trations. He was never called a trimmer, as one of the 
most able writers in the Liberal party called Mr. Forster a 
trimmer, but he was quietly accused of want of conviction. 
He gave his services to the Liberal party as a De Bracy or 
a John Hawkwood lent his lances to king or kaiser. As 
far as the virtues of a free companion went, he was of ster- 
ling service; while all was going well with the Ministry of 
which he formed a part, his bitter speech and hard blows 
were always at the command of his chief. But when the 
fortunes of the political war began to wane, then, some 
said, it was no more safe to rely upon him than it would 
have been to trust to a condotiiere when the money was all 
gone, and there were no tall towns to take. Men had not 
forgotten how, when the position of Mr. Gladstone seemed 
low indeed, Sir William IJarcourt had turned upon his 
captain and his comrades, and had delivered himself of 
what Mr. Gladstone mockingly called " portentous erudi- 
tion " on the Public Worship Bill. He was whispered to 
entertain a very cordial dislike for his leader, but he was 
essential to the Ministry all the same. There was some- 
thing of the Copper Captain, of the Alsatian Trojan, about 
his eloquence, which would have made Sheridan smile and 
Burke shiver, but it was none the less exceedingly effective. 
There were few men in the House of Commons who could 
be called Sir William Harcourt^s match in boisterous de- 



32 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

h'dte-; few men who could stand against him when he was 
hittoig his hardest, and return him blow for blow undis- 
mayed. When he assailed an opponent, he fell upon him 
with all his force, and literally whirled him away. He had 
not the slightest skill in sarcasm, and, to do him justice, 
rarely employed it; but in sheer kivective he was unsur- 
passed, and, within the limits of parliamentary discourse, 
almost unsurpassable. His thunder was not perhaps the 
purest Olymj^ian ; it was more like the clattering bronze of 
a Salmoneus, but it often frightened its immediate hearers 
as effectually as if it had really rumbled from the sacred 
mountain. He was a power in the House, therefore, and 
the minister who had him in service felt safer. Nobody 
could smash an antagonist more effectually; nobody could 
be more noisily indignant,* more obstreperously virtuous, 
more loudly humorous. Sometimes he got into difficulties 
from not taking the trouble to learn the intentions of a 
Ministry, and vociferated one line of policy only to be in- 
stantly contradicted by some fellow-minister, who had to 
assure the House that the Government meant the very op- 
posite of what the Home Secretary had been saying. But 
nobody minded these mistakes much; least of all thoHome 
Secretary himself, who liked to make a rattling speech, 
and be cheered by somebody, and cared very little for the 
effect of his words five minutes after he had uttered them. 
The new Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant had 
hitherto been a man of failures. His friends said that he 
had never yet got the chance of showing his real ability as 
a statesman ; his enemies hinted that he had already made 
the very most of the abilities he was endowed with. Among 
his own party Mr. Forster was not universally admired. 
Mr. F. H. Hill, the author of " Political Portraits,'' per- 
haps the most remarkable political satires smce the " Let- 
ters of Junius,'' is himself a distinguished supporter of the 
Liberal party. He has described Mr. Forster as the most 
dexterous trimmer of his day, as the statesman who had 
taken Mr. Facing-Both-Ways as his political model. " Like 
some barbarous tribes, who sacrifice to the evil spirit be- 
cause they feel that the benevolence of the good spirit is 
theirs already, Mr. Forster has neglected his Liberal friends 
for his Conservative adversaries. The resentment which 
these tactics have created is confined to a section of the 
Liberal party. The distrust which they have inspired is 



ENGLAKD UKDER GLADSTOHE. 33 

far more widely spread, and, unless it be dispelled by a 
different line of conduct, must affect for the worse Mr. 
Forster^s political prospects and career/^ in spite of quali- 
ties " which might insure Mr. Forster a noble career, if he 
could unlearn his practice of maneuvering with his adversa- 
ries against his friends. ^^ These . words, written in 1873, 
while Mr. Forster was still in office, give an excellent idea 
of the estimation in which Mr. Forster was held by the sup- 
porters of his own party a decade since. But one of the 
most skillful strokes in this Political Portrait is where, 
dwelling on Mr. Forster^s histrionic powers, the writer 
describes him as ''^ the best stage Yorkshireman, whether 
in the parliamentary or any other theater, of his day.^^* 
This is an excellent presentation of Mr. Forster^ s character. 
His statesmanship is all stage-play. His is the part of 
heavy virtue, and he rather overdoes it. He has little 
tricks of manner, little bits of " business, ^^ which are 
always being brought into his interpretation of what a 
rough but honest minister ought "to be. He is always cos- 
tumed, figuratively if not actually, as the bluff stage farmer, 
whose word is his bond; who may be rough indeed, but is 
astoundingly honest. He is the " Elephant ''^ of Scott^s 
*' Count Robert of Paris, ^^ who has abandoned the garb of 
a Byzantine stoic for the attire of a stage Yorkshireman. 
It is not difficult to imagine Mr. Forster adapting to him- 
self those lines in Virgil's story which tell of the duty and 
destiny of imperial Rome. Mr. Forster may whisper to 
himself that not for him are the graces of one minister, or 
the Homeric culture of another, the social distinction of a 
third, or the eloquence of a fourth. For him, however, it 
is reserved to rule the world with awful sway, to tame the 
proud, to set free the fettered slave. These are imperial 
arts, and worthy of the honorable member for Bradford. 
Somehow or other Mr. Forster was not quite equal to this 
exalted dignity. He was too anxious to have the applause 
of the House. He was too eager to pose as the great and 
good before both parties. He was not content with being 
a prophet for his own country alone, and hence his ill-suc- 
cess. Mr. Forster's own majestic way — majestic in the 
sense which gave Henry YIII. the title of Bluff, and threw 
a curious luster over "William lY. — ^became too well known 
in St. Stephen^ s. He would begin generally by going on 
the lines of common sense. He would put forth his own 



34 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

views with much display of sturdiness, generally baiting 
them with some ingenious phrase that took a Tory cheer or 
two, and occasionally throwing in a rough-and-ready joke 
of the farmer^s feast order, to show that there is an element 
of dry humor lurking in his rugged nature. When this 
action did not produce its due effect, Mr. Forster generally 
turned to the j)athetic, seemed to lament a world in which 
virtue is misprized, and in which the deeds of men who 
love their land are harshly understood. Tired of behold- 
ing desert a beggar born, and simple truth miscalled — not, 
indeed, simplicity — he would imply that he was eager to be 
gone from all this, but that he felt that he could, not leave 
his love the Commonwealth alone. Mr. Forster was no 
less happy in his imperious moods than in the pathetic. To 
beard the lion in his den and the Douglas in his hall would 
appear not half so desperate a deed as to cross Mr. Forster 
in this most impressive part of his performance. All this 
was excellent, very '* witty and comedy " of its kind, but 
it seemed somehow to lack sincerity. Nobody believed in 
it, either on Mr. Forster ^s own side, which he had so often 
abandoned, or in the Tory camp, whose sweet voices he 
had so often and so successfully solicited. He was ap- 
plauded for his mimetic qualities, not for his candor, nor 
his disinterestedness. 

Mr. Mundella is one of the men to whom the Panglosses 
of our political system are wont to point as a proof of the 
perfection of existing mode of government. He is their 
standing reply to any complaints ujoon the inequality of a 
form of administration which is based largely upon the 
aristocratic principle. Mr. Mundella, they urge eagerly, 
is not an aristocrat. He does not belong to any of the old 
country families which are in themselves an aristocracy. 
He is hardly an Englishman: he began life very humbly; 
he has worked his way up; he has won a political position; 
he is now in the Ministry. How, therefore, can it be said 
that the English method of governing is unequal in its dis- 
tribution of political prizes? Without admitting the valid- 
ity of the argument, it may be at once admitted that, in 
the existing condition of things, a Ministry is so much the 
better which numbers Mr. Mundella among its members. 
The peculiar circumstances attending his rise in the world 
have happily saved him from a too complete subservience 
to antiquated routine. He brings with him into the Cabi- 



ENGLAND UKDEE GLADSTONE. 35 

net an element of freshness of thought which is welcome. 
He is not a Radical of the new school, it is true, but neither 
is he a Whig of the old school. He represents, if only 
vaguely and faintly, the new order, before which the old is 
rapidly giving way. He has ideas and abilities beyond the 
proportion which have hitherto been considered sufficing 
for many ministers of high position under the Crown, and 
as an example of the rapidly decreasing section who formed 
what may be called the left center of the Liberal party, he 
possesses a peculiar interest of his own. 

Among the men of second-rate administrative ability, 
Mr. Ohilders stood high, and Mr. Dodson low. Mr. Ohild- 
ers was one of those sensible, steady-going, hard-working 
politicians who are of considerable service in a Ministry 
formed after the fashion of an English Ministry. He 
might always be relied upon to do reasonably well whatever 
work was set him to do; and though in the nearly twenty 
years that have gone by since he first experienced office as 
a Lord of the Admiralty in 1864, he has not illuminated 
his record with any brilliant or even bright achievements^ 
he has made no egregious blunders, and few conspicuous 
mistakes. He is an eminently safe, if not eminently inter- 
esting, politician. Yet in comparison with his colleague 
Mr. Dodson, who is endowed with very much the same 
kind of political virtues, Mr. Childers seems to rise to the 
level of a Richelieu or a Colbert. Mr. Dodson is an estima- 
ble and painstaking man, with a certain capacity for fig- 
ures such as is in all probability enjoyed by nine out of 
every ten clerks in the kingdom. There is not the faintest 
reason why he should, be a Cabinet minister; no arguments 
to support his claims can be adduced from anything he has 
ever done, or from reasonable speculation as to what he is 
likely to do. He is simply one of the anomalies of our con- 
stitutional system. The best that can be said for him is 
that he is no worse than many others who have, during the 
present reign, held high and responsible office; the worst, 
that he represents the traditions of respectable mediocrity 
in an epoch when that tradition has become wearisome to 
the temper of mankind. 

Sir Henry James is, perhaps, a rather more successful 
man than impartial students of political life had expected 
him to be. " Le petit ira loin," says a character in one 
of Balzac's novels of another. " C'est selon'^is the an- 



36 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

swei", '^ mais il ira." Such a conversation, with Sir Henry 
James for its subject, might very well have taken place 
when Sir Henry James first appeared in political life. If 
the cautious observer could not absolutely indorse the 
prophecies of enthusiastic friends that the representative 
of Taunton would go very far on the pathway of Parlia- 
mentary success, he might safely admit that he- would cer- 
tainly go some way. He has probably gone further than 
most persons would have been willing to predict. He is 
an indispensable and valued member of any Liberal Gov- 
ernment; he is excellent in opi^osition. Behind his bland 
exterior and smooth sentences there is an acridity of at- 
tack, a pungency of e]Digram, which make him a redoubt- 
able ally and a singularly disagreeable opponent. The 
Woman^s Rights party have never forgiven him for his 
barbed sayings about them, sayings which cut, perhaps, all 
the more sharply for the faint feminine element of spite- 
fulness with which they were feathered. Yet, curiously 
enough, there is something in Sir Henry James's manner, 
at once caressing and reassuring, familiar and yet deferen- 
tial, which vaguely suggests the ladies' doctor. 

Mr. Grant Dull, on the other hand, has certainly not 
fulfilled, or even nearly fulfilled, the promise of his youth. 
There was a time when almost anything seemed possible 
for the brilliant and highly cultured young man for whom 
destiny had so agreeably smoothed the road toward distinc- 
tion. It is difficult to say why Mr. Grant Duff's career is 
a disappointing one. Whatever he has tried to do — and 
he has tried many things — he has done well, and some- 
times excellently. He can make good speeches; he can 
write clever books. His '^ Studies in Euro2Dean Politics " 
is probably not much read now. It is not twenty years old, 
and yet the period of which it treats is almost as much 
ancient history as the wars of the third Thothmes; the 
conditions of the political game then are as different from 
the conditions of the game now as they were from the con- 
dition of the game as played by Pericles. Yet *^ Studies in 
European Politics " is in many respects a brilliant book. 
It deserves to be read, if only as an examj^le of the way in 
which political question after political question may be 
treated with a freshness and grace that can be called noth- 
ing less than fascinating. One can hardly help thinking 
that if Mr. Grant Duff had written more he might have 



EITGLAKD UNDER GLADSTONE. 37 

made a greater name. As it is, the part he plays is a 
small one. There are still a few people who believe pro- 
fomidly in Mr. Grant Duff, who follow his utterances with 
anxiety, to whom he is indeed Trophonius; but their num- 
ber is not increasing. 

Loi'd Selborne was a much more prominent politician 
when he sat in the Lower House as Sir Eoundell 
Palmer. He had been a Conservatiye, and he came over 
to the Liberal side of politics, but he never seemed quite to 
belong to or be wholly absorbed in the Liberal party, as he 
indeed shows by calling himself to this day a Liberal- 
Conservative. At one time it was the fashion to speak of 
him as one of the finest speakers in tlie House of Com- 
mons, but the fame of his orator}^ has greatly fallen away 
of late years. He had always the worst defects of the 
Peelite school, all the faults of voice and manner which the 
adherents of Sir Eobert Peel seemed to consider themselves 
bound to adopt together with the principles of their leader. 
Sir Eoundell Palmer always made his speeches in a tone of 
voice which suggested that at any moment the emotions of 
the speaker might prove too much for him, and he would 
burst into a flood of tears. Lord Selborne is essentially a 
theological politician. He may be likened to a Church of 
England version of Thackeray^ s Jesuit Father Holt dis- 
guised as a soldier. Lord Selborne is a Church of England 
divine disguised as a Lord Chancellor; but his theology is 
not illiberal. He strongly opposed the passing of the Ec- 
clesiastical Titles Bill in 1851. The predominance of lhe 
Churchman over the lawyer was shown in him when he 
severed himself from Mr. Gladstone on the question of vhe 
Irish Church, and seemingly cut himself adrift from all 
possibility of political preferment. Virtue was not all its 
own reward in this case. Events were propitious to him, 
and intrusted him with the Great Seal; but while he has 
always shown himself a skillful lawyer, a sound theologian, 
and an honorable politician, he has never succeeded in 
proving himself a statesman. 

The Duke of Argyll seemed a little out of his element in 
a Cabinet which included Mr. Chamberlain, in a Ministry 
which numbered Sir Charles Dilke among its members. 
When, thirty-eight years before, he had, as a boy of nine- 
teen, taken upon himself to lecture the House of Lords in 
his pamphlet '^ Advice to the Peers, ^' he promised to be a 



38 ENGLAND UNDEK GLADSTONE. 

very advanced politician indeed. For a time he kept up 
the character. He supjoorted Dr. Chalmers in the great 
Scottish Church question. In the House of Lords he dis- 
tinguished himself for his impetuosit}^, and for the irrever- 
ent indifference with which he assailed established states- 
men. The Duke of Argyll was undoubtedly clever; he 
made clever speeches, he wrote clever books on all kinds of 
topics, he said clever things, he soon got into the groove of 
office and kept in it, but he never quite justified his early 
reputation; and now in the new Cabinet he distinctly be- 
longed to what might be called the reactionary party. 

■ Lord Kimberley would have been described by Ancient 
lago as ' ' a worthy peer. " He has always been holding 
high offices, and has never made any great mark in any of 
them. He has fulfilled his duties respectably; has never 
been conspicuous for genius or remarkable for any glaring 
blunders. Like the members of the House of Lords in Mr. 
Gilbert's " lolanthe,'' he always — 

" Did nothing in particular. 
And did it very well." 

Ever since he began his career as Under-Secretary for For- 
eign Affairs, under Lord John Russell in 1852, he has 
regularly been accommodated with office whenever a Lib- 
eral Government has come into power, and he has always 
remained serenely indifferent to any desire for distinguish- 
ing himself. The patient ox, which by the borders of the 
Nile walks its unceasing circle in the saliTcieh that draws 
water from the river for the irrigation of the fields, has as 
much ambition for the changeful life of the desert camel as 
Lord Kimberley has to make himself in any way conspicu- 
ous among statesmen. Destined to be in office and in op- 
position in stirring times. Lord Kimberley never conde- 
scended to distinguish himself by any display of administra- 
tive talent while in office, or statesmanship out of office. 

One of the most remarkable episodes of the electoral 
campaign was the conversion of Lord Derby. The con- 
version can hardly be said to have been very sudden or very 
startling. For some time it had been evident that Lord 
Derby was falling slowly away from the faith of his fathers. 
When he resigned his position in Lord Beaconsfield's Gov- 
ernment, shortly before the fall of the Tory Ministry, Lord 
Salisbury assailed him with a savage vehemen(;e, which he 



El^TGLAKD UKDEE GLADSTOKE. 39 

no doubt justified to himself by the certainty that Lord 
Derby was leaving not merely the Ministry but the party. 
It takes a very impetuous and unbridled nature to allow a 
minister to compare with Titus Gates a man with whom it 
may be necessary in future years to act in concert. Lord 
Derby was an able and a conscientious man; his warmest 
admirers would never have called him a brilliant politician. 
He was curiously unlike his father, still more curiously un- 
like the great statesman from whom he fell away in 1878. 
His mind was as free from passion or emotion, or any of 
what may be called the artistic feelings, as if it had been 
the coldly logical machine desired by some of our scientific 
men. His father was as fond of scholarship — not very 
exact scholarship, indeed — as if he had been a Fox or a 
Bolingbroke; the son never showed more affection for arts 
or letters than did the elder Walpole or the younger Pitt, 
but he had a marvelous capacity for getting up facts and 
figures and understanding statistics. The father found 
time to translate Homer; the son undertook to prove to the 
world that even a Tory lord might understand something 
of political economy. 

Lord Derby was a slow, ineffective speaker. Of poor 
delivery in his youth, he never really brightened into any- 
thing ev^n approaching eloquence. He possessed a curious 
power of reducing everything, even the uncommon, to the 
commonplace, so that when he said, as he often did, things 
wise and sensible, and even new, he invariably, or almost 
invariably, so clothed and uttered them as to make them 
appear like the sheerest and tritest truisms. He was 
frigidly methodical, dryly, somewhat drearily, accurate, 
with nothing about him to harass and perplex his party 
and his partisans; he could do what Disraeli could never 
do, he could be intelligent and seem dull; and so in some 
ways he was the very man the Tories wanted when he first 
took office under his eloquent, gifted, showy father. Once 
he had shaken off the chains of office, he was felt to be 
drifting day by day nearer and nearer to straightforward 
recognition of Liberalism. At length came the letter to 
Lord Sefton which announced what every one was expect- 
ing, that he had definitely broken with the Conservatives, 
and had made up his mind, ^' however reluctantly,''' to be 
known henceforward as a Liberal peer. Not a few of his 
former friends and followers regarded him from that day 



40 ENGLAN^D UKDER GLADSTOl^E. 

as if he had really been the Titus Oatesthat Lord Salisbury- 
had painted. They forgot, or they did not care to remem- 
ber, that their own chief had been a Radical, or had at 
least allowed others to think him a Radical, and that it is 
not always fair to consider the change of political opinion 
the same thing as political apostasy. 

Two other members of the new Ministry have yet to be 
mentioned, Mr. Hibbert and Mr. George Osborne Morgan. 
Mr. Hibbert had been in office before, the same office to 
which he was now reappointed, that of Parliamentary 
Secretary to the Local Government Board. The most re- 
markable event of his political career is his connection with 
the Municipal Franchise Act. Mr. Osborne Morgan is 
chiefly connected in the public mind with the Burials Bill, 
but there was a time when he thought more of the laurel 
than the cyj^ress. In his youth he cultivated the Mnses, 
not unsuccessfully, so far as the winning of a Newdigate 
prize for verse can be called success; but he soon aban- 
doned poetry for the law, and it is not likely that he has 
ever regretted his choice. Lucian once, in a dream, was 
wooed by Art and Philosophy, to choose between them; 
and the prudent Greek ranged himself by the side of Phi- 
losophy, who seemed to promise him the most comfortable 
existence. It is not probable that Mr. Osborne Morgan 
would have added much to the poetry of his century. At 
least, there is no certainty that he would do so assured in 
the opening lines of his " Settlers in Australia:" 

" Who that has wandered by the ocean shore. 
His full soul echoing to the wild waves' roar. 
Feels not their spirit as a thrilling bond 
Linking his fancy to the worlds beyond; 
Till his rapt thoughts, exulting, yearn to stray 
With the wan billows glimm'ring far away? 
Earth has her barriers, but thou, mighty Sea, 
Biud'st man be one, divisionless, like thee." 

It is not very easy to imagine Mr. Osborne Morgan now 
desirous of wandering by the ocean shore, and allowing his 
full soul to echo, or his rapt thoughts to stray. Certainly 
a youthful ambition to be divisionless is most unfortunately 
answered by a manhood passed largely in the division lob- 
bies of the House of Commons. But although Mr. Osborne 
Morgan has forsworn the Muses, it is possible, if not very 
likely, that he sometimes sighs for the recreations of his 



EKGLAKD UlSTDEJEl GLADSTONE. 41 

youth, and dreams of fashioning a madrigal or hammering 
out an ode when his more immediate business is the draft- 
ing of a measure or the emendation of a clause. But if 
any such ideas ever harass him, he allows no sign of it to 
appear in his demeanor. There is as little display of 
poetry in Mr. Osborne Morgan's language as there is of 
eccentricity in his garb. 



CHAPTER III. 

MR. BRADLAUaH. — THE FOURTH PARTY. 

Parliament met on Thursday, April 29, and the House 
of Commons re-elected Mr. Brand as Speaker. The next 
few days were devoted to swearing in the members. A 
ceremony which invariably takes several days was destined 
on this occasion to prove less monotonous and more mo- 
mentous than is usual, and to beget a '^ question " which 
was destined to be a torment to the Government all through 
their career, and the cause of several severe Ministerial de- 
feats. Among the new members returned to the House of 
Commons by the general election was Mr. Charles Brad- 
laugh as one of the representatives, in companionship with 
Mr. Henry Labouchere, of Northampton. Mr. Brad- 
laugh^s had been a strange and strenuous career. He was 
born poor; he had educated himself; he had fought against 
many difficulties, and overcome them. He had been a pri- 
vate soldier; he had been in a solicitor's office; he had 
been the editor of free-thinking newspapers. He had made 
a sort of religion of free-thought, and went about preach- 
ing it everywhere, often at great personal risk to himself, 
always with aggressive hostility to religious belief in general 
and the Christian belief in particular. He was connected 
with the struggle for Italian independence; he was on terms 
of intimacy with many of the leaders of the Fenian move- 
ment of 1867; he played a prominent part in the agitation 
which led to the Hyde Park meetings and the passing of 
the Reform Bill of 1866. He had tried unsuccessfully be- 
fore to enter Parliament. He was undoubtedly an orator 
of great ability and power. He represented a large body 
of opinion in England politically as well as philosophically. 
He was well known to entertain objections to taking any 



42 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

oath which implied belief in Christianity, and in his many 
struggles with the law he had fought this point again and 
again. Naturally the greatest curiosity was felt as to the 
course he would pursue when he entered the Commons' 
chamber. On Monday, May 3, Mr. Bradlaugh came to 
the table of the House of Commons and handed a paper to 
the chief clerk, stating his wish to be allowed to make 
affirmation instead of taking the oath in the usual manner. 
This he claimed the right to do under the Parliamentary 
Oaths Act. The Speaker threw himself upon the judg- 
ment of the House, and Lord Frederick Cavendish rose and 
moved the appointment of a select committee to inquire 
into the case. Sir Stafford Northcote approved of this 
course. The Government were destined to be unlucky in 
every stage of this question. When the House met again 
on Wednesday, the 5th, Lord Eichard Grosvenor brought 
down no small indignation from the Opposition by propos- 
ing to add to the select committee the names of. men who 
at the time were not members of Parliament. The names 
were those of ministers who had to stand again after taking 
office; and though there was every probability of their re- 
, election, still they were not members of the House, and 
there was at least the ]30ssibility that they might not be 
members. There was some wrangling over this point, and 
at last the House was adjourned till the following Monday, 
when due notices of the names could be given, and the com- 
mittee formed on the following day. On the Tuesday 
Lord Richard Grosvenor moved his committee. It was 
vigorously opposed by Sir Henry Wolff, who maintained 
that until the Queen had explained the cause of calling Par- 
liament no business beyond the swearing in of new mem- 
bers and the issuing of new writs could be entertained. In 
asking why the Government were in such a hurry he hit at 
once the weakness of the Ministry. They did undoubtedly 
seem far too much in a hurry, far too eager to ** rush 
things. '^ A sharp debate followed, but the Government 
carried their point, and the committee was nominated. 
The committee was composed of Mr. Walpole, its chair- 
man. Sir Gabriel Goldney, Major Nolan, the Attorney- 
General, the Solicitor-General, Mr. Watkin Williams, Sir 
Henry Jackson, Mr. Sergeant Simon, Mr. Whitbread, Mr. 
John Bright, Mr. Massey, Sir John Holker, Mr. Grant- 
ham, Mr. Staveley Hill, Mr. Pemberton, Mj.'. Hopwood, 



EITGLAKD UN'DER GLADSTOKE. 43 

Mr. Chaplin, Mr. Beresford Hope, and Lord Henry Len- 
nox. The committee decided against Mr. Bradlaugh, 
though only by the casting vote of the chairman. The 
committee decided that Mr. Bradlaugh did not belong to 
the class of persons who, like Quakers and Moravians, are 
exempted by law from the necessity of taking the oath. 
The Government had no donbt hoped that the decision of 
the committee would have been favorable, for both its law 
officers voted in favor of the relief of Mr. Bradlaugh; the 
Opposition perhaps fancied that they would get rid of Mr. 
Bradlaugh by the refusal. 

After the committee had reported against Mr. Brad- 
laugh, Mr. Bradlaugh declared himself ready to take the 
oath, came into the House on May 21, and demanded to be 
sworn according to the invariable custom. But the Op- 
position was ready for him. Sir Henry Wolff interposed 
between Mr. Bradlaugh and the Clerk of the House. He 
insisted that the House ought to refuse to accept Mr. Brad- 
laugh^s oath. The position was indeed perplexing. So 
far as we know, the whole records of Parliamentary life do. 
not afford a single precedent for refusing to allow a mem- 
ber to take the oath. The circumstances of the case itself, 
however, were without precedent. Mr. Bradlaugh had 
previously objected to take the oath. His claim to be 
allowed to affirm in Parliament, as he had been allowed to 
affirm in law courts, implied that the oath was not binding 
upon him. Moreover, Mr. Bradlaugh had issued a mani- 
festo after the refusal to allow him to affirm, in which he 
declared to the world and to the city that the oath con- 
tained unmeaning words, and the like. What was to be 
done? The best that the ingenuity of Parliament could 
devise was to suggest the formation of a new committee to 
consider this new feature of the problem. A committee 
was accordingly formed which, after much deliberation, 
came to the conclusion that Mr. Bradlaugh could not be 
allowed to swear, but hinted that it would not really be a 
bad plan to let him affirm, and take whatever legal conse- 
quences, if any, would fall upon him by so doing. Perhaps 
of all the ways of getting out of the difficulty, this was 
about the worst. The House had first refused to allow Mr. 
Bradlaugh to affirm; now it was proposed that he should 
be allowed to affirm as an interesting experiment in polit- 
ical and legal science, while a bewildered senate stood dj to 



44 El^GLAND UNDEE GLADSTONE. 

see what happened. • Such as the advice was, the Ministry 
did not then decide to act upon it. Mr. Labouchere, Mr. 
Bradlaugh^s colleague in the representation of Northamp- 
ton, met the decision of the committee by moving, on June 
21, a resolution that Mr. Bradlaugh be allowed to affirm. 

Mr. Henry Labouchere was one of the most interesting 
men in the new Parliament. As his name implied, he was 
■ of an old French family. Huguenots, who had settled in 
, England. He had passed his youth in the diplomatic 
service. He had traveled widely, and had a profound ac- 
quaintance with men, women, and manners in every capital 
of the world from Constantinople to Washington. A thorough 
man of the world in that sense of the time-honored phrase 
with means that the man to whom it is applied has made 
himself perfectly acquainted with all the weaknesses and 
follies of humanity, Mr. Labouchere delighted to play the 
part of an easy-going, imperturbable, suave-lived cynic. 
Had he lived in Athens under Alexander, he would have 
been sure to make friends with Diogenes, and would 
certainly have irritated the tubbed philosopher beyond meas- 
ure by the easy superiority and wider scojie of his own con- 
summate disbelief in all that the *' dog " affected to disbe- 
lieve. In the Eome of Nero he would undoubtedly have 
enchanted Petronius by what the arbiter would have called 
the ^^ curious felicity'^ of his criticisms on humanity; 
while even the chronicler of Neronic Eome might have 
been sur^Drised, if not abashed, by the corrosive skepticism 
of his companion. Mr. Labouchere had played many 
parts, and done many things, in his varied career. He had 
been a diplomatist. He had been a financier. He had 
been a politician of very advanced Liberal politics in Par- 
liament for a year, from 1867 till 1868. He had owned 
theaters. He had gained great distinction as a journalist 
by living in Paris during its siege, and sending really brill- 
iant descriptive letters about his experiences to the '* Daily 
News,'' of which he was one of the j^roj^rietors. He was 
one of the original founders of the *' World,'' when that 
herald of society journals was started, and, after a while, 
he withdrew from the " World " in order to start a society 
journal of his 0\vn. " Truth " is one of the instances on 
record of a journal whose popularity and existence depend 
entirely on one man. It is read wherever the English 
language is spoken by people who are anxious to know 



ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 45 

what Mr. Labouchere tliinks of things in general. Often 
enough, no doubt, utterances and articles are accepted as 
Mr. Labouchere^ s with which he has nothing whatever to 
do; but, none the less, it may be taken as certain that 
^' Truth '' would be as impossible without Mr. Labouchere^s 
cool frankness and demure, merciless C3nLiicism as the 
^' Tattler '' would have proved if Steele had handed it over 
to some dullard like the editor of the " True Patriot. ^^ 
" Truth '' has been cruel, but it has been the terror and 
the scourge of a crowd of swindlers and charlatans and 
rascals; and if the butterfly scandals of society have been 
pinned on its pages, these pages have always been open to 
the chivalrous defense of the ojopressed, the unpopular, the 
unjustly judged. Of all his various experiments and ex-pe- 
riences, that of political life appeared to afford Mr. Labou- 
chere the greatest pleasure, for in 1874: he stood again for 
Parliament, and was defeated. At the general election of 
1880 he- stood again for Northampton, and was returned at 
the head of the poll. He made himself at once the cham- 
pion of his colleague^ s case. His resolution that Mr. Brad- 
laugh be allowed to affirm was supported by the Prime 
Minister; it was rejected on June 22 by 275 votes to 230. 
Mr. Bradlaugh on the following day, Wednesday, June 23, 
presented himself at the table to be sworn. The Speaker 
gravely informed him of the resolution of the House, and 
called upon him to withdraw. He claimed to be heard at 
the bar of the House, and heard at the bar he accordingly 
was for the first, but not the last, time. After an eloquent 
speech, he once more announced his intention of seeking to 
be sworn, and advanced toward the table. The sergeant- 
at-arms touched him on the shoulder, and Mr. Bradlaugh 
at once retired below the bar, only to come forward once 
more and appeal energetically, from the floor of the House, 
against the decision of the Commons. The Speaker then, 
having done all that lay in his own power to do, appealed 
to the House itself, and Sir Stafford Northcote moved that 
Mr. Bradlaugh be arrested. The warrant was immediately 
made out, and Mr. Bradlaugh was confined at once in the 
clock tower. 

It was felt only too keenly, however, that the House had 
gained nothing whatever by this step. They had only 
placed themselves in a false j)osition, from which, as a 
matter of fact^ they had to retreat, almost immediately. 



46 El^GLAND UNDER GLADSTONE, 

They had indeed got Mr. Bradlaugh under lock and key, 
but it was simply impossible that they could keep him so. 
He was not in the least likely to abandon the position he 
had taken up; his claim, whether legally right or wrong, 
was one which has a great deal of sympathy, not only in 
the country, but in the House itself. There was nothing 
for it but to release Mr. Bradlaugh as soon as possible from 
his confinement in the clock tower. Then the Government 
took a curious step. On Thursday, July 1, Mr. Gladstone 
introduced a resolution allowing any one claiming the priv- 
ilege to make affirmation instead of taking the usual oath, 
the person so affirming to be subject to any statutory pen- 
alties if it were afterward decided that he had broken the 
law by the act. This lame resolution was adopted on 
division by 303 to 249 votes, and gave Mr. Bradlaugh the 
right, of which he availed himself on the following day, to 
come to the table of the House, make affirmation, and take 
his seat as a member. In point of fact the Ministry, re- 
membering the ingenious advice of the second committee, 
had suggested that Mr. Bradlaugh should be allowed to 
affirm at his own risk, as it were. In other words, they 
said, " We will not allow you to take the oath; to affirm is 
probably illegal, but we will allow you to affirm, and see if 
any one will sue you for so doing.'' In this spirit the 
Government allowed Mr. Bradlaugh to affirm, and so, for 
a season, Mr. Bradlaugh found himself really representing 
Northampton. An action, however, was immediately 
brought against him to recover heavy penalties for having 
sat and voted without previously taking the oath. As the 
legal penalty is £500 for each offense, and as Mr. Brad- 
laugh voted incessantly during his brief occupation of his 
seat, the sum claimed from him rapidly assumed gigantic 
proportions. 

The Opposition can hardly be said to be to blame for all 
this muddle. . They were bitter over their big defeat; they 
had seemed to be engaged in a hopeless struggle with the 
great Liberal Ministry with its gigantic majority; and lo! 
at the very beginning of the session, fortune put into their 
hands an unexpected way of harassing their triumphant 
foes. On the Bradlaugh question the quick-witted among 
the Tories saw that the Liberal majority was unmanage- 
able, could not be counted on. The disheartened took 
courage; the depressed became animated; they struck out 



ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONB. 47 

at the Government, and found that their blows told. It 
would be too much to expect such an Opposition to forego 
the chance of revenge that one election had thus afforded 
them. At least they did not, and again and again in the 
history of the Parliament they were able to strike at their 
enemies with tremendous effect whenever the question of 
the representation of Northampton came up for discussion. 
Undoubtedly Mr. Bradlaugh himself was in some measure 
to blame for what happened. If it was against his conscience 
to take the oath, it was clearly his duty not to take it, 
and abide the consequences. We know, however, that Mr. 
Mill did not consider it hypocritical for even an unbeliever 
to take the oath of allegiance in its entirety. 

The Bradlaugh episode had one curious influence upon 
the House of Commons — it consolidated, it might, indeed, 
be said to have created, the Fourth Party; and it brought 
a new man prominently forward into political life. Lord 
Randolph Churchill had been half a dozen years in Parlia- 
ment when Mr. Bradlaugh was elected member for North- 
ampton, but up to that time he had played practically no 
part in the House. When he spoke he was listened ta be- 
cause he was the son of a great Tory duke; but nobody 
paid much attention to what he said, and it occurred to 
nobody to regard him as a political influence. Mr. Brad- 
laugh^ s advent was Lord Randolph ChurchilFs opportunity. 
He made himself at once conspicuous as the opponent of 
Mr. Bradlaugh and the atheistic Government who support- 
ed him. Burke, flinging the dagger of the Jacobites on 
the floor of the House of Commons, found a modern imita- 
tor in Lord Randolph Churchill trampling under foot some 
printed writmgs of the member for Northampton. The 
House had laughed at Burke; it also laughed at LorA Ran- 
dolph Churchill; but it soon began to discover that Lord 
Randolph Churchill was not a young man to be put down 
or disconcerted by any amount of laughter. He asserted 
himself again and again; he spoke as often as he pleased; 
he treated the recognized leaders of his party with a frank 
indifference which was not a little shocking to established 
Conservative traditions. He began alone, but he soon 
found companions. Like King John in Anthony Munday^s 
play, he held up his sword, and bid '' those that intend 
as I, follow this steely ensign lift on high.''^ Three other 
persons were found to " intend " as Lord Randolph 



48 ENGLAXD L'KDER GLADSTONE. 

Churchill intended — Sir Henry Wolff, Mr. Gorst, and Mr. 
Arthur Balfour. These four gentlemen found themselves 
agreed as to the necessity of lending ]iew vigor to the Tory 
cause, and their own fate-appointed duty to lend that vigor. 
They formed a little party together, a small Tory cave, 
soon nicknamed in the slang of the House the Fourth 
Party, as the part)'' of Parnellites had already been called 
the Third Party. At first the House was hardly inclined 
to take the Fourth Party seriously. It thought the thing 
was only a joke, and rather a j^oor and imjoertinent joke. 
But Lord Kandolph Churchill soon made it clear to the 
House of Commons that he was not, in their sense, a hu- 
morist. He had not formed a party 7^0 ?/?• rirCf but a party 
that was destined to become a decided power in debate; 
ai]d it was a party of which he was the acknowledged 
leader. At first the Government and its supporters, and 
even the gentlemen in o^^position above the gangway, were 
inclined to smile scornfully whenever Lord Eandolph rose 
to inform the amused Commons of his intentions, and the 
intentions of those who acted with him. But in a little 
while the Government and its followers, and the gentlemen 
in opposition above the gangway, began to perceive that 
Lord Eandolph^s attitude was not quite so comic as it had 
ajjpeared at first. With hapjDy political insight he had per- 
ceived a want in the composition of the House of Com- 
mons, and with ha23p3^ political audacity he determined to 
fill that want himself. The Conservative party had lost all 
its j^assion and most of its vitality since its chief had gone 
to the House of Lords. Under the gentle and genial guid- 
ance of Sir Staft'ord .]Si"orthcote, the chief characteristic of 
the Conservative party appeared to be a comprehensive 
amiability. With felicitous ins23iration Lord Randolph 
C^hurchili conceived the formation of an advanced Tory 
party, obe}ing his orders, and repeating the tactics of the 
advanced Liberals below the gangway, which had done 
their own party such signal service during the previ- 
ous Parliament. It soon became evident that Lord Ran- 
dolph was the leader of a little Tory cave ready to accept 
the adherence of any of the discontented and the distressed 
who would join his flag. The Government found itself 
suddenly opjjosed by a new and eccentric element in the 
political battle. Sir Stafford Northcote's method of op- 
position had led them to expect a more peaceful occupa- 



EKGLAKD UKDEE GLADSTOKE. 49 

tion of office than fate and tlie Eourtli Party had in store 
for them. Lord Randolph charged upon the Government 
with all the energy of Don Quixote, when he fancied that 
he saw before him the armies of King Agramante. When- 
ever there was a chance of annoying the Liberal leaders, 
whenever there was an opportunity of harassing them in 
their plans, or of disturbing their arrangements. Lord 
Eandolph was sure to do it. The Government were more 
embarrassed than they would have liked to admit by Lord 
Randolph and his friends. The Government could not al- 
ways count with perfect security upon the adherence of all 
their own followers, but they could always feel assured of 
the miresting hostility of Lord Randolph Churchill and his 
fellows of the Fourth Party. The ranks of the Ministerial- 
ists could not furnish forth any champion so audacious, so 
self-reliant, so indifferent to ojoinion as Lord Randolph 
Churchill. Lord Randolph Ohurchiirs party may be 
looked upon as in some sense the revival of the Young- 
England movement with which Lord BeaconsfiekVs youth 
was connected. It was, however, a Young England move- 
ment suited to the spirit of the age. It had not the poetry, 
the sentiment, the romance which colored the career of the 
party of which Mr. Bailie Cochrane and Lord John Man- 
ners were the illustrious ornaments. But it had an energy, 
we might even say a ferocity, of purpose, which was much 
better suited to the matter-of-fact temper of the House of 
Commons of to-day. It aimed straight for political success, 
but it fought for it on the good old Tory lines which had 
been abandoned. It opposed to the growing spirit of Radic- 
alism, not the temperate and mild-mannered Conservatism 
of Sir Stafford [N'orthcote, nor the fantasies of Lord Claud 
Hamilton, but a vigor and determination, a fixity of pur- 
pose, akin to that which of old deserved the title of stern 
and unbending. 

Hostile critics described Lord Randolph Churchill and 
his little band as ^' political Mohocks, ^^ or compared them 
with the cabal formed by Mr. Bertie Tremaine in Lord 
Beaconsfield^s " Endymion.'''' Friends likened it to the 
gallant quadrilateral of musketeers in Dumas^s story who 
were united by destiny to accomplish great deeds. If we 
were to accept this parallel, Lord Randolph Churchill is of 
course the D^Artagnan of the party. 

He has all the audacity, all the serene belief in his own 



50 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

ultimate success, which was characteristic of the famous 
Gascon who started in life with the assurance that great 
things were awaiting him, and who ended liis career at 
Malplaquet with the marshal's baton in his hand. A man 
who means to succeed, and who has in him the stuff for 
success, can not often perhaps do better than to 230se confi- 
dently before the world as a man for whom fortune reserves 
laurel victory. Lord Eandolph Churchill did thus pose as 
the heir exjoectant of fair fortune. He never allowed him- 
self or his audience to forget that he was the leader of an 
important party, and the bearer of a mighty mission. The 
greatness of the party was not always obvious, the meaning 
of the mission was sometimes occult; but still there was the 
party, and somewhere in its midst lay the mission, like the 
heart of the Bruce, none the less sacred because it was not 
visible. ^' It must be night for Friedland's star to shine,"" 
says Wallenstein in Schiller's great play. In the existing 
political night Lord Eandolph Churchiirs star is shining 
with remarkable brightness in the Parliamentary firmament. 
If Lord Randolph Churchill was the D'Artagnan of the 
party. Sir Henry Wolff might, in many respects, fairly 
claim to be its Aramis, just as Mr. Gorst would naturally 
become its Porthos, and Mr. Arthur Balfour gracefully 
interpret the part of Athos. Mr. Gorst was a rapidly ris- 
ing lawyer, who had joassed much of his life in New Zea- 
land, and had written a book upon the Maoris. He had 
been in Parliament for Cambridge from 1866 to 1868; at 
the general election he lost his seat, and did not enter Par- 
liament again until 1875, in which year he became at once 
member for Chatham and a Queen's Counsel. Mr. Arthur 
Balfour was a curious contrast to the bustling, energetic 
lawyer. He introduced into Parliamentary life that air of 
languid indifference which Lord Melbourne once tried to 
make fashionable, and which was pardonable in a young 
man who had sought distinction on the different paths of 
diplomacy and philosophy before he was two-and-thirty. 
The great problems of existence remain unchanged by Mr. 
Balfour's "Defense of Philosophic Doubt." The Euro- 
pean balance has scarcely undergone any finer adjustment 
irom Mr. Balfour's presence in Berlin in the summer of 
1878. Still, to have played any jDart in these two different 
and diverse subjects is something in itself. But the most 
fortunate move Mr. Balfour ever made was when he with- 



EInTGLAITD UNDEK GLADSTO^-E. ^51 

drew his virtus from its efforts in the philosophical aether, 
and joined himself to the ranks of the Fourth Party. 

Sir Henry Wolff plays an important part in the economy 
of the Fourth Party. He has had more experience in the 
game of statesmanship than Lord Randolph Churchill, 
and his counsel is of great value to the energetic leader, 
who is too wise to believe that the capacity for leadership 
is above the necessity of learning. Sir Henry Wolff is emi- 
nently skilled in those moves of statesmanship which belong 
to diplomatic action. He was not indeed born to the diplo- 
matic purple. The bearer of an honored name, which re- 
commended him to the attention and the sympathy of 
statesmen, he gained, early in life, that practical education 
in statesmanship and diplomacy, that knowledge of foreign 
countries and of foreign courts, and, above all, that close 
acquaintance with the trouble of^ all politicians — the 
Eastern question^-which made him an invaluable ally to 
the founder of a new school of Toryism. Intimate 
acquaintance with foreign countries and foreign modes of 
thought naturally descended to him from his father. A 
generation ago the name of Dr. Wolff was familiar and 
honored in all the capitals of Europe. A distinguished 
traveler and an eminent scholar. Dr. Wolff deserves special 
remembrance for the noble efforts which he made to rescue 
the captive English officers, Stoddart and Oonolly, who 
died a cruel death at the hands of a Bokhara tyrant. The 
intrepidity which was characteristic of the father is scarcely 
less characterisbic in other fields of the son. He is a man 
of pronounced ideas and of belligerent tastes. He likes 
political battle for the sake of battle, and he is therefore 
eminently in his right place in the Fourth Party. 

The new party was formed in undoubted opposition to 
Sir Stafford Northcote. Sir Stafford Northcote was not a 
leader after the hearts of the Tories below the gangway of 
the Fourth Party, and of men who, like Mr. Chaplin, were 
allies, if not adherents, of the Fourth Party. The men 
below the gangway wanted battle, and Sir Stafford North- 
cote was not warlike; they wanted aggression, and Sir 
Stafford Northcote was not aggressive. He would not at- 
tack the Government as Lord Randolph Churchill loved to 
attack it; he would not summon Sir Richard Cross and 
Lord John Manners to rise and assist him in harrying the 
Prime Minister. The fact that he had been Mr. Glad- 



52 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

stone^s secretary was in itself enough to create a certain 
alliance between himself and his political 'opponent, which 
for long did much to calm the trouble of debate. Whoever 
else might wrangle and call names. Sir Stafford Northcote 
and Mr. Gladstone were faithful to their ancient amity. 
They resembled Homeric heroes, who recognize some guest- 
friend m the lines of war, and hold their hand and ex- 
change civilities wMle the fight rages around them. Sir 
Stafford Northcote always shone in the amenities of debate. 
There was no one more ready to reply to an antagonist in 
words of kindly sweetness; no one to whom it was more 
jDleasant for a foe to pa}^ a com23liment^ since he was sure 
to get his gracious words returned in yet more gracious 
fashion. In one of Marryat's sea novels, the young mid- 
shipman listens with dismay to the way in which sailors 
call each other names and indulge in profuse profanity. 
He reflects that it would be much easier and pleasanter for 
them to address each other in the forms of polite society; 
to say ^' if you please, ^^ and ^' will you be so good,'^ and 
^' thant you,'^ instead of the more forcible, but sadly in- 
elegant vernacular, of which they had so complete a com- 
mand. Sir Stafford K"orthcote is somewhat like Marryaf's 
young midshipman. He is convinced that political discus- 
sion would be far j^leasanter if there were no disagreeable 
interchange of stinging phrases and hostile terms. If Par- 
liament were to be managed according to his ideas, it would 
run in something of this fashion. Every one would assume 
that every one else was acting with the best possible inten- 
tions, and was inspired only by the loftiest purposes. Every 
one would begin his speech by praising the manner, if not 
the matter, of his opponents' arguments. Difference of 
oiDinion shoidd be exj^ressed in a regretful tone, as if the 
speaker was j^ained to disagree with any one, and was only 
forced to do so by an overmastering sense of public duty. 
Little compliments might be lightly exchanged. A gentle 
banter should be the nearest approach to anything like per- 
sonality. Under such a mild and benignant sway the 
Saturnian age was to return to the earth, or at least to 
that i^ortion of it called Westminster. Then politicians of 
all joarties should abide in peace, " a golden race on earth 
of many-languaged men,'' who should live — 

" With calm, untroubled mind, 
Free from the toil and aDi!;uish of our kind." 



EKGLAKD UNDER GLADSTON'E. 53 

Some such shape Sir Stafford Northcote^s pohtical Utopia 
would take; but if he dreamed of realizing it at St. 
Stephen^ s, the dream was not fulfilled. For such a system 
of brotherly love^ more was needed than the personal ex- 
ample of an ex- Chancellor of the Exchequer, no matter 
how amiable. The guerillas below the gangway would not 
fall in with Sir Stafford Northcote^s ideas. He wanted 
peace, and they wanted war; so the warriors seceded and 
formed the Fourth Party. 



CHAPTER IV. 

AFGHANISTAK. 

Ok the Continent, in Central Asia, and in South Africa 
the GoYernment were involved in the complications left un- 
finished when Lord Beaconsfield^s Ministry fell from 
power. One complication, however, which might have 
proved serious, was entirely the property of the new Ad- 
ministration. This was the difficulty with Austria. In 
one of his Midlothian speeches, that of the second series de- 
livered in Edinburgh on Wednesday, March 17, ,1880, Mr. 
Gladstone alluded to an account given in the London 
papers of some observations of the Emperor of Austria. 
" Did you see,^^ asked Mr. Gladstone, " that the Emperor 
of Austria sent for the British embassador. Sir Henry 
Elliot, and told Sir Henry Elliot what a pestilent person 
he considered a certain Mr. Gladstone to be, as a man that 
did not approve of the foreign policy of Austria; and how 
anxious he was — so the Emperor of Austria was conde- 
scendingly pleased to say — ^for the guidance of the British 
people and of the electors of Midlothian. How anxious he 
was, gentlemen, that you should all of you give your votes 
in a way to maintain the Ministry of Lord Beaconsfield. 
Well, gentlemen, if you approve of the foreign policy of 
Austria, the foreign policy that Austria has usually pur- 
sued, I advise you to do that very thing. What has that 
policy of Austria been? Austria has been the steady, un- 
flinching foe of freedom in every country in Europe. Rus- 
sia, I am sorry to say, has been the foe of freedom too, but 
in Russia there is one exception — Russia has been the friend 
of Slavonic freedom; but Austria has never been the friend 



54 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

of Slavonic freedom. Austria trampled Italy under foot, 
Austria resisted the unity of Germany, Austria did all she 
could to prevent the creation of Belgium, Austria never 
lifted a finger for the regeneration and constitution of 
Greece. There is not an instance, there is not a spot upon 
the whole map where you can lay your finger and say, 
* There Austria did good.'' ^^ Statements like these were 
undoubtedly unfortunate, coming at such a time and from 
such a man. Even the most enthusiastic of Mr. Glad- 
stone's admirers may admit that a man who was seeking to 
be Prime Minister of England, who had been Prime Min- 
ister, and who, it was then evident, would be Prime Minis- 
ter again, had need to be very guarded in the language 
which he used in condemnation of a foreign power's foreign 
policy. To have allowed himself to be piqued into retort 
by some observations of the Emperor of Austria would have 
been unlucky enough, but at least he should have been 
very sure that the words were really uttered by the Em- 
peror of Austria before proceeding to reply to them in a 
tone of acrimony. As a matter of fact. Sir Henry Elliot 
at once contradicted the statement that the Emperor of 
Austria had used any such words to him, or had made to 
him any statement bearing any resemblance to the alleged 
words. Unfortunately Mr. Gladstone aggravated the orig- 
inal difficulty by practically repeating his attack on Aus- 
tria's foreign policy again, in his eighth Midlothian speech, 
delivered on Wednesday, March 24, 1880. *' I have,'' said 
Mr. Gladstone, " condemned the foreign policy of Austria. 
I have said that outside of Austria, making no reproach as 
to what is inside of it — that outside of Austria the name of 
Austria has, upon all occasions known to me, been the 
symbol of misgovern men t and oppression in other coun- 
tries. That neither in Germany, nor in Belgium, nor in 
Greece, nor in Italy, where most of all she was concerned 
— for she was the virtual mistress of Italy until Italy was 
made a kingdom — in no one of these is her name known, 
except in conjunction with the promotion of what you and 
I believe to be wrong, and the repression of what you and I 
believe to be right." Mr. Gladstone then declared that he 
discerned " menacing signs that the Austrian Government 
of to-day, and especially the Hungarian portion of its sub- 
jects — is engaged in schemes for re2^ressing and putting 
down the liberty of the lately emancipated communities in 



ElifGLAKD UNDEE GLADSTOKE. 55 

the Balkan peninsula, and for setting up her own supremacy 
over them, whether they like it or not/'' All this was 
severe language to a nation with whom we were at peace, 
with whom we were often obliged to confer, with whom we 
might at any moment be in alliance. Whatever might be 
thought of Austria^ s foreign policy in the pa&t, such a 
sweeping attack upon it from one who was soon to be at 
the head of the English Government was little likely to 
promote good-feeling between the two countries. But it 
was doubly unfortunate when it became a sermon preached 
on the text of a reported conversation with the Emperor of 
Austria, the accuracy of which was denied by one of the 
principal actors in the alleged dialogue. Not unnaturally, 
there was considerable discontent in Austria at Mr. Glad- 
stone's statements, and when Mr. Gladstone became Prime 
Minister the Government felt that something must be done 
to allay the irritation. Mr. Gladstone accordingly wrote a 
letter to Count Karolyi, the Austro-Hungarian embassador, 
which was practically a letter of apology to the Emperor of 
Austria. '' At the moment,^'' said Mr. Gladstone in this 
letter, " when I accepted from the Queen the duty of form- 
ing an Administration, I forthwith resolved that I would 
not, as a minister, either repeat or even defend in argu- 
ment polemical language in regard to more than one for- 
eign power which I had used individually when in a posi- 
tion of greater freedom and less responsibility. " After 
some assurances that he entertained no hostile feelings 
toward Austria, but, on. the contrary, wished -her well in 
the task of consolidating her empire, Mr. Gladstone went 
on: '^ "With respect to my animadversion on the foreign 
policy of Austria, at times when it was active beyond the 
borders, I will not conceal from your Excellency that grave 
apprehensions had been excited in my mind lest Austria 
should play a part in the Balkan peninsula hostile to the 
freedom of the emancipated populations, and to the rea- 
sonable and warranted hopes of the subjects of the Sultan. 
These apprehensions were founded, it is true, upon second- 
ary evidence, but it was not the evidence of hostile wit- 
nesses, and it was the best at my command. " Acknowl- 
edging the assurance of Count Karolyi that Austria had no 
intention of extending the rights it had acquired under the 
treaty of Berlin, Mr. Gladstone went on : " Had I been in 
possession of such an assurance as I have now been able to 



56 EKGLAKD UNDER GLADSTONE. 

receive, I never would liave uttered any one of the words 
which your Excellency justly describes as of a painful and 
wounding character. Whether it was my misfortune or 
my fault that I was not so supplied I will not now attempt 
to determine, but will at once express my serious concern 
that I should, in default of it, have been led to refer to 
transactions of an earlier period, or to use terms of censure 
which I can now wholly banish from my mind. ^^ Mr. 
Gladstone concluded by saying, "I think that the explana- 
tion I now tender should be made not less public than the 
speech which has supplied the occasion for it; and as to the 
form of such publicity, I desire to accede to whatever may 
be your Excellency's wish. " 

There could be no doubt in the mind of any Austrian or 
any English i^olitician of the completeness of this ajDology. 
It must be admitted that it did not give much satisfaction 
in England. Even those who felt most keenly the rash- 
ness of Mr. Gladstone's attack upon Austria were not in- 
clined to rejoice over the manner in which Mr. Gladstone 
had made amends. If the charges against Austria had 
been exaggerated, surely there was no small exaggeration 
in the tone of the reply. How, for example, people asked, 
did the fact that Austria had no aggressive intentions with 
regard to the peoples of the Balkan peninsula enable Mr. 
Gladstone to wholly banish from his mind the terms of 
censure which he had emplo3^ed against Austria? Mr. 
Gladstone had challenged his hearers to point to any spot 
on the map of Europe where Austria had done good; he 
had with great justice complained of her action with regard 
to Belgium, to Greece, and, above all, to Italy. How 
could Mr. Gladstone banish these censures from his mind 
because Austrian statesmen now engaged themselves to . 
keep within the limits of the treaty of Berlin? It may j 
have been ill-advised to choose such a time and ]3lace as a 
general election and a Midlothian hustings for censuring 
Austria with regard to her foreign policy of old; but her 
declaration of future policy could not obliterate the jDast, 
or make Mr. Gladstone's censures upon it the less deserved 
because they were untimely. The apology was felt to be 
too complete, too comprehensive. Not a few persons were 
ready to urge that an apology of any sort was a mistake; 
that an English Prime Minister had no right to apologize 
for his utterances as a private individual, because he could 



EKGLAND UNDEE GLADSTONE. 57 

not, so long as he held office, make his apology entirely of 
an individual character, but unavoidably lent it something 
of a national value. Into that subject it is not necessary 
to go. Mr. Gladstone had certainly acted indiscreetly in 
his Midlothian speeches in attacking the Austrian Emperor 
for words he had not used, and denouncing a policy that 
was not going to be put into action. An apology clearly 
was due, and there is nothing unbecoming in a frank and 
honorable apology. Frank and honorable Mr. Gladstone's 
apology undoubtedly was, but in his anxiety to make all 
amends he went too far, and apologized for much that 
needed no apology. Whether right or wrong, the fact that 
the apology had to be made was unlucky for the new Min- 
istry. It was a small thing, perhaps, but omens are 
usually small things, and there was certainly something of 
evil omen to a new Ministry in having to begin its career 
with such an apology for such a cause. 

The Austrian episode being thus disposed of, there were 
other European questions to occupy the attention and tax 
the ingenuity of the new Ministry. The treaty of Berlin 
had bound the Ottoman Empire to certain concessions, 
which she did not now appear at all anxious to carry out. 
An extension of frontier had been promised to Greece, a 
cession of territory to Montenegro; and the Hellenes and 
the Montenegrins were loudly complaining that their claims 
were being neglected. In the case of Greece the Porte was 
taking no steps whatever; and toward Montenegro the 
Porte had acted in a manner that was worse than inaction. 
Turkey had withdrawn all her troops from the territories 
that had been assigned to Montenegro, and had allowed 
the Albanians to forestall the Montenegrin s and occupy the 
territories themselves. This the Montenegrins naturally 
regarded as a breach of contract. Turkey was pledged to 
hand over the assigned territories to Montenegro, not 
merely to withdraw her troops and let any one who pleased 
run in and take possession. As the matter stood, Mon- 
tenegro would either have to fight for her land with the 
Albanians, or go without all she gained by so much hard 
fighting at the Congress of Berlin. The English Govern- 
ment at once took action. Mr. Goschen was sent to Con- 
stantinople as a special embassador, during what was diplo- 
matically described as the absence of Sir Henry Layard on 
leave. Mr. Goschen was empowered to put the opinion of 



58 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

England very clearly before the Porte, and to express in 
the strongest termS the necessity for Turkey to carry out 
the pledges entered into by her at the Congress of Berlin. 
Lord Granville further issued a circular note addressed to 
the great signatory Powers of tlTe Berlin treaty, calling 
upon them to join in concert in impressing upon Turkey 
the necessity of settling the Montenegrin and Greek ques- 
tions. A conference was called at Berlin to consider the ' 
protocol to the Berlin treaty which laid down the claims of 
Greece. With regard to Montenegro the Porte pursued for 
a considerable time its favorite policy of delay. It neither 
refused nor promised to do anything; it simply listened 
and did nothing. A collective note was addressed to the 
Porte, and was met as usual with excuses, half -promises, 
and entire inaction. At last the Powers, losing patience, 
announced definitely that the town and district of Dulcigno 
should be peacefully surrendered to Montenegro by a cer- 
tain date. If at that time the Porte had not complied with 
the wishes of the Powers, it was announced that the con- 
certing Powers would take some means of enforcing their 
demands. The Porte, whether from lazy fatalism or a 
profound disbelief in the joint action of the great Powers, 
regarded this ultimatum with indifference, and did nothing. 
Then the great Powers joined together in a naval demon- 
stration against Turkey. Seldom, perhaps, has any com- 
bined action oh the part of European Powers been made 
the subject of such general European merriment. The 
conditions under which the naval demonstration took place 
were indeed sufficiently grotesque. The fleet which assem- 
bled at Ra^'usa under the command of Sir Beauchamp Sey- 
mour Avas sent there to demonstrate, but it could do noth- 
ing more than demonstrate. The European Powers could 
not agree upon any definite line of action, and the fleet 
was therefore definitely bound to make no overt act against 
anybody. If the Montenegrins attempted to occupy Dul- 
cigno, and were assailed by the hostile Albanians, the ad- 
miral of the fleet was expressly forbidden to offer any assist- 
ance to the little state. The fleet had been sent there to 
demonstrate, but for any value the demonstration had under 
such conditions, the ships of the fleet might as well have been 
sheltered in their EurojDean harbors as lying at anchor oppo- 
site Ragusa, or drifting idly in the waters of the Adriatic. 
Naturally the Porte was not greatly alarmed by such a 



ENGLAND UNDEE GLADSTONE. 59 

hollow demonstration. A child may be frightened at first 
by a pantomime mask; but when it discovers that the mis- 
shapen features are no ogre, but mere painted card-board, 
concealing some pacific countenance, its terror soon disap- 
pears. The demonstration was as unreal as a Christmas 
monster, and it did not terrify Turkey, but it made her 
very angry. She announced that she would take no steps 
whatever in the surrender of Dulcigno until the naval 
demonstration was put a stop to. Of course Turkey was 
well aware of the dissensions of the European Powers, and 
the want of a common European policy, which rendered 
the European concert really of little worth. Then the 
British Government proposed to change the scene of the 
naval demonstration from Eagusa to Smyrna. Here at 
once the European concert fell asunder. Russia and Italy 
were willing enough to join in a demonstration against the 
Homeric city at the foot of the slopes of Tmolus, but Aus- 
tria and Germany were most reluctant to take the responsi- 
bility, and France refused point-blank to have anything to 
do with the proposed expedition. But though the war- 
ships of the six Powers never rode at anchor in the soft 
waters of Smj^na Bay, beneath the worn and ragged walls 
of the ancient citadel of the Byzantine emperors, the threat 
to do so had its effect. It seemed at one time by no means 
certain that England would not herself, of her own re- 
sponsibility, send her fleet into Smyrna Harbor, as the 
Venetians did in the end of the seventeenth century. Tur- 
key prepared to come to terms; the dissensions in the 
European concert gave her heart of grace enough to bluster 
and delay a little longer while the combined vessels idly 
patroled the sea. T]ie terrors of an Albanian rising were 
dwelt upon by Ottoman statesmen without producing any 
effect upon England, and at last the Porte put the business 
into the hands of Dervish Pasha, and bade him carry out 
the decrees of Europe as quickly as might be. Dervish 
Pasha was a stout soldier and a brave man; he mocked 
himself of the Albanian threatenings, forced his way into 
Dulcigno, and handed the hill town over to the delighted 
Montenegrins. For the time the quarrel was over; the 
fleet that had been the cause of so much inextinguishable 
laughter at first, and of the cession in the end, dispersed, 
and the foreign flags no longer floated together in menac- 
ing combination on the pleasant Adriatic. 



60 ENGLAKD UNDER GLADSTONE. 

There was of course still the Greek question left to settle, 
but that had to stand over for the time. European diplo- 
macy had, by strange chance, been able to agree upon the 
claims of Montenegro, and to act in agreement; but on the 
claims of Greece it was hopeless just then to expect any 
such agreement. The great Powers had acted together 
wonderfully well for a little while; to expect them to act 
together for long was to form exj)ectations based upon no 
precedents. In vain did the King of the Hellenes go on 
the stump through Europe from one great capital to 
another, urging that what the Berlin treaty had promised 
the Berlin signatories should give. Turkey would not 
come to terms, and the great Powers would not unite to 
compel her. France had apparently adopted a thorough- 
going policy of abstention; she was in general symj^athy 
with the cause and the claims of the Greeks, but just now 
she would take no active part in sup2:)orting them. Aus- 
tria and Germany were equally averse to action, and with- 
out these three Powers there was nothing to be done. For 
a time it seemed as if the Greeks would take the matter 
into their own hands, and try once more a fall with their 
old foe in the brave squares of war. All over Greece the 
war fever was burning; crowds w^ould come together on the 
great square of the Constitution in Athens, and stand op- 
posite the ugly white palace of Bavarian Otho and clamor 
for war against the Turks. The Ministry of Tricoupis, 
which appeared vacillating, was overthrown; the speeches 
of the King assumed a warlike tone, and his poj^ularity 
rose accordingly. In ^olus and Hermes streets, in the 
smiling islands of the ^gean, in the classic cities of Pelo- 
ponnesus, the desire to fight the Turk was growing stronger 
day by dsij. Men hummed the old Kleptic war-songs and 
looked to their rifles. The army was swollen with daily re- 
cruits. At the Cafe Solon men talked and thought of 
war. It may be admitted that behind all this warlike dis- 
play there was, in the minds of the leaders at least, a very 
keen sense of the difficulty of the situation, and a well- 
developed diplomatic purpose. It was not likely that the 
Greeks could ever wrest from the Turks what they wanted 
by force of arms, but it was still less likely that the Powers 
of Europe could look on at Greece fighting at desperate 
odds against the Ottomite and not put forth a hand to help 
her. On tliis the leaders calculated not miwisely. Turkey 



ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 61 

saw the danger of the scheme well enough. Shs^ ^new that 
if Greece went to wsr t'i\e KSii5rjine Porte would never be 
allowed ,hjr jETcfrope to send her iron-clads under the com- 
mand of Hobart Pasha to the Pir^us to play again the part 
of the Persians. So Turkey called upon Europe to inter- 
fere first instead of last;, to use its influence, with Greece to 
prevent the Hellenes from going to war. Europe accord- 
ingly did use its influence. Pressure was brought to bear 
upon the Greek Ministry. War was deferred until diplo- 
macy had once more tried its hand at a settlement of the 
claims. 

There were difficulties in India^ too. When the new 
Government came into power^, the Viceroy of India, Lord 
Lytton^ at once resigned. Lord Lytton^s had been a 
singular viceregal career. Anthony in Egypt or Verres in 
Sicily appeared to be the model he had chosen to govern his 
actions by; and if he was scarcely less unpopular than 
VerreS;, it must also be admitted that he was scarcely less 
picturesque than Anthony. Lord Lytton was a poet before 
he became a politician^ and he was eager it may be for the 
satrapy of India, because there and there alone perhaps it 
would be possible for him to realize at least something of 
the gorgeous Oriental splendor with which he surrounds 
and delights in surrounding his own Alexius. In India, 
the haunted land of luxury, might be realized those 
^' domes of purple, populous with star on star of silver;^^ 
those floors " carpeted with deep, thick-tufted crimsons, 
soft as summer sleep under the footsteps of delicious 
dreams ;^^ and those *^' dim gardens green and deep,'" 
where minstrels should sing of Osesar^s sjolendor and 
Csesar^s state, "that doth Olympian glories emulate. 'V 
In the '' gold-crowned Orient " of India all that was im- 
possible now for the cold " iron Occident '' was possible; the 
power of a proconsul, pageants that might pufc to shame 
all that the mind of Mantegna dreamed for a triumjDhant 
Caesar; durbars which might rival in splendor of color and 
jeweled bravery the glories of the courts of Byzantium. If 
we quietly put on one side for the moment all questions of 
political morality or expediency, we may admit that the 
opportunity was a fascinating one for a poet, and that from 
a merely artistic point of view Lord Lytton was not un- 
worthy of it. Had Catullus been made Prsetor of Bithynia 
instead of Caius Memmius, we can imagine that he would 



^^ ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

have conducted him^scix Lh. ov^.xxv. ownh fashion, would have 
been pleased with the display of splendor about him, have 
enjoyed the idea of making a war on his own account, .and 
so aggrandizing the empire and immortalizing his name, 
would have rejoiced to strike gold medals in honor of some 
fair and shapely queen of the arena. But if poets were not 
likely to make good governors of provinces even in the 
Augustan age, they were still less likely to do so in the age 
of Victoria. It was a fascinating part to i^lay, and one 
which other writers of verse and dreamers of old dreams 
may sympathize with, or even envy. But it was too costly, 
too unreal, and too much out of date to please the cold 
politician and the burdened taxj^ayer. It was, indeed, only 
possible when Lord Beaconsfield was at the head of affairs. 
The man who created the brilliant Sidonia might very well ' 
pardon the son of his old friend for reproducing Sidonia in 
the land of the Great Mogul. But when Lord Beaconsfield 
fell from power it was clear that the rule of Lord Lytton in 
India was over too. Mr. Gladstone and his friends would 
not appreciate a rej^resentative who played at Haroun al 
Easchid in the gardens of the East, and strove to recall 
some gleams of his golden prime in Calcutta or Bombay, 
or the cool ranges of Simla. So Lord Lytton at once re- 
signed his office, and Lord Ripon was sent out to India as 
Viceroy in his stead. 

Lord Ripon had all the qualities that go to make a suc- 
cessful administrator. He was able, he was eloquent, he 
had learned in his own person the necessity for religious as 
well as political tolerance. Some years before he had gone 
over to the Catholic faith, and his change of religion 
aroused the greatest indignation among English politicians. 
Had he committed some act of shame he could hardly have 
been more fiercely assailed by the newspapers and the 
public opinion of the drawing-rooms and clubs. It was 
confidently announced as an axiom which needed no dis- 
cussion, that of course, after this. Lord Ripon could never 
hope to play any further part in Znglis? politics, could 
never dream of holding any office in any English Ministry. 
It was assumed as a matter of course that a statesman and 
a peer who so changed his religion must of necessity be at 
once relegated to the obscurity, and something more than 
the obscurity, of private life. Political society was agreed 
that Lord Ripon's career was closed, but in the years that 



EKGLAND UKDEK GLADSTONE. 63 

elapsed since Lord Eipon^s conversion, political opinion 
appeared to have altered; the indignation and alarm had 
cooled down, and people saw Lord Ripon go out to India 
as Viceroy without any apprehension that the end of the 
world was coming and Judgment Day at hand. Out in 
India, Lord Ripon needed all the ability he possessed to 
deal with the situation of affairs. ' Our inheritance in 
Afghanistan was perplexing enough. 

The Treaty of Gandamak was signed on May 5, 1879. 
It bound the English Government to pay the Ameer 
Yakoob Khan £60,000 a year, and to support him against 
any foreign enemy Avith money, arms, and men. In re- 
turn, Yakoob Khan consented to grant the demand which 
had always been the point of quarrel with Afghanistan, 
namely, to allow a British envoy to reside in Oabul. Fur- 
ther, the Ameer ceded what came to be known, in the 
words of Lord Beaconsfield, as the "scientific frontier. ^^ 
Then came the Cabul massacre of Louis Cavagnari and his 
staff. British troops a second time fought their way to the 
ill-omened city. The sullen and feeble Yakoob Khan sur- 
rendered himself, abdicated, and was sent a prisoner to 
India. We held Oabul; the question remained what we 
were to do with it. Mohammed Jan, a scheming sirdar, 
one of Yakoob's generals, and a man of great influence 
with the Wardak section of the southern Ghilzais, rose up 
against the British. Many of the fierce tribes rallied to his 
standard; many a white-clad Ghazi, frenzied to fanaticism 
by Moollah tales of English insult to religion and to 
women, devoted himself on the Koran to aid Mohammed 
Jan to exterminate the hated Kaffers, the thrice-accursed 
British. The English troops had withdrawn at the 
approach of winter into the Sherpur cantonments. 
Mohammed Jan, with an army of more than ten thousand 
men, swept down upon Oabul, occupied the city, set up 
Musa Khan, the youthful son of Yakoob Khan, as nominal 
Ameer, and proceeded to besiege Sherpur. Mohammed 
Jan seems for a time to have really believed that he was in 
the position of Akhbar Khan in 1841, and had an Elphin- 
stone to deal -with who must come to terms. He demand- 
ed the immediate release of Yakoob Khan, the surrender 
of two British officers as hostages until this was done, and 
the immediate retirement of the British force into India. 
But the men cooped up in the Sherpur cantonments defied 



64 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

Mohammed Jan^s beleaguerment. Re-enforcements arrived, 
and in the end of December Mohammed Jan retired from 
Oabul, which was once more left open to the British. 
Another candidate for the Afghan crown then came for- 
ward under Russian auspices — Abdurrahman Khan. 
Abdurrahman Khan- was the son of Mohammed Afzul 
Khan, Dost Mohammed^ s eldest son. He was bom in 
1830. Dost Mohammed bequeathed the succession to his 
favorite son, Shere Ali. Afzul Khan and his son Abdur- 
rahman, with another son of Dost Mohammed, Azim 
Khan, conspired unsuccessfully against Shere Ali. After 
fighting and scheming for five years, Abdurrahman Khan 
was completely defeated by his nephew, Yakoob Khan, 
and hurriedly retreated into Tashkend in 1869. Since 
then he had lived with the Russians at Samarcand, striving 
mainly to induce General Kauffman to aid him to regain 
his rule, and saving his money for the time, which he be- 
lieved must come at last, for his return to Cabul. There 
was yet a third foeman in the field, in the person of Ayoob 
Khan, the hero of Afghan poets. Ayoob Khan, one of 
the ablest of Shere Ali^s sons, was born in 1851. He took 
his brother^s part in the quarrel between Yakoob Khan 
and Shere Ali. When Yakoob fell into his father's, hands, 
Ayoob fled to Persia, where he remained the honored guest 
of the Shah until the fall of Shere Ali inspired him with 
new hope of empire. He returned to Herat, where he was 
welcomed as the son of Shere Ali. Here he soon raised an 
army and bided his time. That time now seemed to him 
to have come, and he was now leading a large, if some- 
what irregular, force from Herat against our garrison at 
Oandahar, where Lord Lytton had recognized Shere Ali 
Khan — namesake of the son of Dost Mohammed — an inde- 
pendent Wall. The position of England in Afghanistan 
was not unlike'that of the king in the " Arabian Nights,^^ 
who is informed by successive scouts that armies are ad- 
vancing from every point of the compass toward his capi- 
tal. In the Arabian story, how^ever, the advancing armies 
are soon found to be of peaceful purpose; while, in the case 
of England, the various claimants of the Afghan crown 
had, or appeared to have, the one common purpose of hos- 
tility to Great Britain. It was absolutely necessary to 
diminish the number of the opponents. Of the various 
competitors, Abdurrahman seemed to have the best chance 



EN"GLAND UN'DER GLADSTOI^E. ' 65 

of success; and we entered into negotiations with him 
through Mr. Lepel GriSfin, who came to Oabul to consider 
the situation. 

In the meantime the English arms suffered a reverse 
near Oandahar as terrible as any in the chronicle of our 
oonnection with Afghanistan. Oandahar^ the Iskandahar 
of Alexander the Greats was under the command of Gen- 
?eral Primrose — a brave and popular officer, some sixty years 
of age, with considerable experience in dealing with Asiatic 
peoples. It was not the sort of place which a small force 
would w illingly undertake to hold against a large force. 
It stands on a cultivated plain at the foot . of Tarnak Val- 
ley, in the midst of fruit orchards, of cornfields and cocoa 
groves, watered by numerous canals. On three sides of the 
plain rise high hills; to the east stretches the rocky, almost 
waterless, desert. The town is surrounded for some four 
miles in circumference by wretched walls of sun-baked 
mud and chopped straw, not thirty feet in height, flanked 
here and there with towers, and defended by a ditch ten 
feet deep and twenty-four feet wide. The citadel, in the 
center of the northern face, was in fairly good condition. 
In 1842, 'wretched though the place was. General Nott had 
succeeded in holding it against the Afghans, and General 
Primrose was not expected to repeat the heroic feat under 
similar conditions of terrible disproportion between attack- 
ers and attacked. Yet, in spite of the terrible weakness of 
the force in Oandahar, it was decided by the authorities in 
India that some portion of this small force should be dis- 
patched from Oandahar to meet the advance of Ayoob 
Khan and give him battle. There are few things in mili- 
tary history more surprising than the blunder which sent 
General Burrows, at the head of a force of little more than 
two thousand men, to encounter the whole strength of 
Ayoob ^s army. 

Ayoob Khan^s forces had been under-estimated. Large 
numbers of the troops of the Wall of Oandahar, estimated 
at four thousand men, deserted to the army of Herat; how 
iar with the guilty cognizance of Shore Ali will probably 
never be known. Thus General Burrows, instead of acting 
with his little force as a support to the Wali^s army, found 
himself left to encounter Ayoob alone on the undulating 
ground between Kushk-i-Nakhud and Maiwand. An en- 
gagement took place on July 27. General Burrows led a 



6(3 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

force of less than 2500 men of all arms. Of his 1500 
bayonets, only 500 were British, men of the '^ Old Berk- 
shire " 60th. The rest were Sepoys of the 1st Bombay 
Grenadiers and the 30th Bombay Native Infantry, known 
as "' Jacobus Eifles. ■''' Some 600 sabers were chiefly made 
up of the well-horsed Bombay Cavalry and the Scinde 
horse, whose long, light bamboo lance has proved one of 
the most terrible and deadly of military weapons. There 
were besides some Royal Horse Artillery, and a company 
of native sappers. To add to the extremity of the odds 
against General Burrows^ s force, the Indian companies are 
said to have been under-officered, an error to whicii some 
measure of the disastrous result was attributed. Among 
the disadvantages of the little force it must be mentioned 
that General Burrows, though a brave man and most capa- 
ble official, had never, we believe, been in action before. 

The enemy, on the contrary, was exceptionally strong. 
Swollen in its march from Herat by tribal levies and the- 
deserters from the Wali^s ranks, it probably numbered at 
least 12,000 men. With the British there were only 
twelve guns, six of which were smooth bores; while the 
enemy had about three times the number, and used them, 
with terrible effect. After some six hours^ engagement it 
was clear that the British had lost the day. The English, 
troops fought splendidly, but the Sepoys of Jacobus Rifles 
were inexperienced soldiers, some of whom it is said had 
never fired ball cartridges before. A panic seized the 
Sepoys, they broke and surged in confused flight upon the 
66th. From that moment the chance of success was gone. 
The SejDoy rifles could not be rallied, the Sepoy sabers were 
in their turn overmastered by fear. The Grenadiers of the 
66th fought bravely in the now bewildering medley, and 
were cut down by hundreds. A remnant made a desperate 
rally behind some mud walls for awhile, and for a little 
time managed to check the Ghazis, who surged after their 
standard-bearers in wave after wave of yelling trium23h 
upon the few, the unhappy few, the band of brothers who 
were trying to retrieve the fortunes of the day. At last, as 
the ammunition began to run out, as the numbers thinned^ 
and the panic of the native troops spread. General Burrows, 
gave orders for the retreat to Candahar. The retreat be- 
gan slowly and in good order, but as the victorious Afghans, 
pressed up the retreat became a rout. There were fifty 



EKGLAND UKDEE GLADSTONE. 67 

miles between the fugitives and Candaliar. The j^ursuit 
of the enemy appears to have only lasted some few miles, 
after which they returned to loot General Burrows' s camp, 
hut all the villagers and hill-men along the Girishk Road 
turned out upon the track of the flying men with terrible 
effect. Tire British and Sepoys fell under the harassing 
Afghan fire, or were dispatched by the Afghan knives. 
Many dropped to the earth from fatigue and thirst, whom 
no Afghan steel or bullet reached. All the horrors of the 
inarch through the Jugdulluk Pass in 1842 were repeated. 
Along the road, slippered with blood, a bewildered mass of 
men and officers, mules and camels, fled and fell before 
the merciless pursuers. By some mistake, the wrong road 
ior retreat — the ' ' lower " or main road, absolutely water- 
less in the summer months — ^had been taken instead of the 
^^ upper '' road ordered by General Burrows. In conse- 
quence of this fatal error all along the line of the retreat 
no water was to be obtained, and the demoralized men re- 
fused to follow General Burrows from this main road into 
the country on either side in search of water. To within 
a few miles of Oandahar the fight and flight went on, every 
mile of the road being marked with the dead bodies of 
English and Indian soldiers. When the wretched remnant 
of the little force reached the banks of the Arganadab 
many of the suffering soldiers drank water for the first 
time for two days, while General Burrows hastened on to 
Gandahar to tell the tidings of his defeat, and the loss of 
half his men. General Brooke, who was himself afterward 
killed in a sortie, set out with some cavalry and conducted 
the unhappy survivors safely into cantonments. There 
was no further question of attacking Ayoob Khan. The 
parts were reversed. Oandahar was besieged. 

The news of the defeat was received in England with 
dismay and anger. Afghanistan had indeed been an ac- 
cursed country to England. Like the Oriental monarch 
who desired never again to hear the sound of the name of 
the race that had again and again defeated him in battle, 
the English people might well have prayed never to hear 
the name of Afghan king or Afghan city again. Not 
just then, though, not until the hateful memory of Mai- 
wand was effaced by some English victory, as in 1842 the 
triumph before the broken walls of Jellalabad did some- 
thing to obliterate the horror and shame of the Jugdulluk 



68 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

Pass. The situation at Oandahar was terrible. General 
Primrose was shut up there with a small force and the 
remnant of the men who had fought at Maiwand. Before 
them were the victorious swarms of Ayoob's followers, 
flushed with their victory over an English army. Military 
counsel at Cabul decided on one bold stroke; if that failed,, 
then indeed the position of the British, not only in Afghan- 
istan, but over all the continent of India, was perilous in- 
deed. General Sir Frederick Roberts, with a force of some 
10,000 men, British, Ghoorkas, and Sikhs, the utmost that 
could be spared him, was sent from Cabul to relieve Oan- 
dahar and revenge Maiwand. He marched at the head of 
his little band out into the trackless regions between Cabul 
and Candahar, out into impenetrable darkness and silence, 
as far as those were concerned who in every Indian and 
every English community waited in hope and fear for^ 
news. For three weeks nothing whatever was heard or 
known of Sir Frederick Roberts and his 10,000. He dis- 
appeared as Sherman disappeared when he plunged into 
the South on his famous march to the sea. At length it 
was known that Sir Frederick Roberts had come to still 
un taken Candahar, had hurled himself against Ayoob 
Khan, and totally defeated him. Everything had depend- 
ed upon that chance, and it had been won; the English 
hardly dared to ask themselves, now it was all over, how 
would it have been if they had lost? 

In the meantime, while Roberts was on his way to Can- 
dahar, the new Emir had been received as sovereign of 
Afghanistan. After much consultation with his astrolo- 
gers, Abdurrahman had learned the lucky day for his 
entry. The stars, it seems, had written, too, that Abdur- 
rahman must wear an emerald ring on his finger on the 
fateful day, and in defiance of Pliny's warning that an 
emerald must never be engraved, a ring was accordingly 
prepared, bearing his name and the date from the Hegira 
graven upon it. Before the ausj^icious day when Abdur- 
rahman, with the ring, might enter Cabul, the last of the 
British troops had left the Sherpur cantonments, and fol- 
lowed General Stewart on the way to India. The line of 
march lay through the passes which had been soaked in 
blood in 1842. The march was now peaceful enough, the 
hill tribes were quiet; the oppressive heat was the most 
serious antagonist the troops had to meet. 



ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 69 



CHAPTEE V. 

THEBOERWAR. 

Difficulty and disaster in Afghanistan were balanced 
by difficulty and disaster in South Africa. Difficulties 
with the native tribes there had been ever since English 
colonists had settled at the Cape, but the present difficulty 
was not with Zulus, but with the Dutch settlers of the 
Transvaal. During the whole history of the South African 
colony the relations between the English and the original 
Dutch settlers had never been cordial, had often been war- 
like. The Cape had originally been a purely Dutch settle- 
ment, founded by the Dutch East India Company in the 
middle of the seventeenth century. In 1795 it was taken 
by the British, under Admiral Elphinstone, during the 
French war, only to be restored again at the Peace of 
Amiens. In 1806, when England and France were again 
at war, the importance of the Cape as a military and naval 
station induced the English to recapture it, after a brave 
and vain resistance on the part of the Dutch. From that 
time the colony remained a dependency of the British 
Crown. The early history of the colony is a record of the 
struggles of the settlers, both English and Dutch, against 
the despotic system of government established by Lord 
Charles Somerset; of Kaffer wars, in which the colonists 
were often hard put to it to hold their own; and of the 
struggle for the liberty of the Press, sustained with success 
by John Fairbairn, and Thomas Pringle, the poet of South 
Africa, the Ovid of a self-chosen exile. For a time the 
Dutch and English settlers lived in peace and amity to- 
gether, but the English efforts to alleviate the condition of, 
and finally emancipate, the slaves, severed the two races. 
The Dutch settlers held the old Biblical notions about 
slavery, and they r )sented fiercely the law of 1833 emanci- 
pating all slaves throughout the colony in 1834. The 
Boers at once determined to '^trek,^^ to leave the colony 
which was under the jurisdiction of the English law, and 
find in the South African wilderness, where no human law 
prevailed, food for their fiocks, and the pastoral freedom 
of Jacob and of Abraham. 



70 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

The Boers would live their own lives in their own way. 
They had nothing in common with the Englishman, and 
they wished for nothing in common. In the intensity of 
his religious feeling the Boer presented a close parallel to 
the unbending Puritans who founded New England. Next 
to his religion the Boer loved isolation. He wished' for 
personal as well as political independence. He likes, says 
Mr. Thomas Fortescue Carter, who knows the race well — 
" he likes to be out of the sight of his neighbor's smoke; to 
live fifteen or twenty miles from any other man's dwelling 
is a source of satisfaction rather than dissatisfaction to him. " 
The patriarchal customs of the Boers, which invariably led 
their children to settle in the vicinity of their parents, j^re- 
vented this isolation from being actually companionless. 
'i^hey were a primitive people, farming, hunting, reading 
the Bible, pious, sturdy, and independent; and the colo- 
nial Government was by no means willing to see them leave 
the fields and farms that they had colonized in order to 
found fresh states outside the boundaries of the newly ac- 
quired territory. But the Government was powerlesss; it 
tried, and tried in vain, to prevent this emigration. There 
was no law to 2)revent it. The Boers themselves might not 
have unreasonably challenged the law, if it had existed, to 
bind them. They were Dutchmen, not English; their 
J3utch Government might cede its broad lands in the Cape 
to England, but it could not cede the citizenship and the 
liberties of the dwellers on the lands. They were free to 
go where they pleased; they were no serfs bound by un- 
alienable ties to the soil they tilled. Even if it had been 
argued that the lapse of time had practically made them 
Britisli subjects, there could be no means of hindering 
British subjects from seeking, when they jDleased, their 
fortunes elsewhere than within the narrow limits of the 
Crown colony. So, with their wagons, their horses, their 
cattle and sheep, their guns, and their few household goods, 
the hardy Boers struck out into the interior and to the north- 
east in true patriarchal fashion, seeking their promised 
land, and that " desolate freedom of the wild ass " which 
was dear to their hearts. They founded a colony at Natal, 
fought and baptized the new colony in their own blood. 

The Zulu chief, Dingaan, who sold them the territory, 
murdered the Boer leader, Peter Retief, and his seventy- 
nine followers as soon as the deed was signed. This was 



ENGLAND UNDEK GLADSTONE. 71 

the beginuing of the Boer hatred to the native races. The 
Boers fought with the Zuhis successfully enough, fought 
with the English who came upon them less successfully. 
The Imperial Goyernment decided that it would not per- 
mit its subjects to establish any independent governments 
in any part of South Africa. In 1843, after no slight 
struggle and bloodshed, the Dutch republic of Natal ceased 
to be, and Natal became part of the British dominion. 
Again the Boers, who were unwilling to remain under 
British rule, ^'^ trekked" northward; again a free Dutch 
state was founded — the Orange Free State. Once again 
the English Grovernment persisted in regarding them as 
British subjects, and as rebels if they refused to admit as 
much. Once agam there was strife and bloodshed, and in 
1848 the Orange settlement was placed under British au- 
thority, while the leading Boers fled for their lives across 
the Yaal Kiver, and, obstinately inde23endent, began to 
found the Transvaal Eepublic. After six years, however, 
of British rule in the Orange territory the Imperial Gov- 
ernment decided to giv^e it back to the Boers, whose stub- 
born desire for self-government, and unchanging dislike 
for foreign rule, made them practically unmanageable as 
subjects. In April, 1854, a convention was entered into 
with the Boers of the Orange territory, by which the Im- 
perial Government guaranteed the future independence of 
the Orange Free State. Across the Vaal River the Trans- 
vaal Boers grew and flourished after their own fashion, 
fought the natives, established their republic and their 
Volksraad. But in 1877 the Transvaal republic had been 
getting rather the worst of it in some of these struggles, 
and certain of the Transvaal Boers seem to have made sug- 
gestions to England that she should take the Transvaal 
republic under her protection. Sir Theophilus ^he^jstone 
was sent out to investigate the situation. He seems to 
have entirely misunderstood the condition of things, and 
to have taken the frightened desires of a few Boers as the 
honest sentiment of the whole Boer nation. In an evil 
hour he hoisted the English flag in the Transvaal, and de- 
clared the little republic a portion of the territory of the 
British Grown. 

As a matter of fact, the majority of the Boers were a 
fierce, independent people, very jealous of their liberty, and 
without the least desire to come under the rule to escape 



72 ENGLAlfD UKDER GLADSTOifE. 

wliich they had wandered so far from the earhest settle- 
ments of their race. But in 1877 the repubhc was in a 
very crippled condition from the Secocoeni wars and bad 
administration, and no immediate resistance was made to 
the annexation. There were even among the leaders of 
the national movement many Boers, who, at the time, ac- 
cepted without a murmur the rule of Sir Theophilus Shep- 
stone. But the dissatisfaction was none the less deep, 
'i'lie Boers of the Transvaal sent deputation after deputation 
to England to appeal, and ai3peal in vain, against the an- 
nexation. Lord Carnarvon had set his whole heart upon 
a scheme of South African confederation; his belief in the 
ease with which this confederation might be accomplished 
was carefully fostered by judiciously colored official reports. 
Lord Carnarvon believed that his dream was about to be- 
come reality, and he was deaf or indifferent to appeals 
which seemed to interfere with or prove obnoxious to his 
cherished design. English representatives at the Cajje made 
it clear to the Boers again and again that they must not 
entertain any hope of being allowed to return to their in- 
dependence. Sir Bartle Frere, ^^ as a friend, ^^ advised the 
Boers " not to believe one word ^^ of any statements to the 
eflect that the English i^eople would be willing to give up 
the Transvaal. '' Never believe, ^^ he said, " that the 
English people will do anything of the kind. " When the 
chief civil and military command of the eastern part of 
South Africa was given to . Sir Garnet Wolseley, Sir Garnet 
Wolseley was not less explicit in his statements. He pro- 
claimed that the " Transvaal territory shall be, and shall 
continue to be forever, an integral portion of her Majesty's 
dominions in South Africa. " With Nai^oleonic brusqueness 
of epigram, he announced, on aiiother occasion, ^^ So long 
as the sun shines the Transvaal will remain British terri- 
tory. '^ The utterance of such brave maxims as these was 
part of the Civil Commissioner's official duty, but Sir 
Garnet Wolseley was compelled to admit, in a dispatch to 
the Colonial Office dated October 29, that there was grave 
discontent in the Transvaal; that it seemed to be the inten- 
tion of the Boers to fight for freedom, and that " the main 
body of the Dutch population are disaffected to our rule." 
In spite of the announcement of Sir Bartle Frere, Sir 
Garnet AVolseley, and Sir Owen Lanyon, the disaffected 
Boers were not without more or less direct English en- 



EKGLAKD UNDEE GLADSTONE. 73 

couragement. The Boer deputations had found many friends 
in England, and when they came back to the Transvaal with 
their disappointment they could at least tell their fellows 
that if the zeal of confederation had eaten up Lord Car- 
narvon in England and Sir Bartle Frere at the Cape, there 
were those in England v/ho sympathized deeply with the 
Boers in their hunger and thirst for freedom. One of those 
who thus sympathized • was Mr. Gladstone. In his Mid- 
lothian speeches he denounced again and again the Con- 
servative policy which had led to the annexation of the 
Transvaal, '' a free European, Christian, republican com- 
munity;^'' and had endeavored to ^' transform republicans 
into subjects of a monarchy, ^^ against the will of more than 
three fourths of the entire people. ^'^ The Transvaal,^' 
Mr. Grladstone declared on STovember 25th, 1879, " is a 
country where we have chosen, most unwisely, I am 
tempted to say insanely, to place ourselves in the strange 
predicament of the free subjects of a monarchy going to 
coerce the free subjects of a republic, and to compel them 
to accept a citizenship which they decline and refuse.^' 
'^ Is it not wonderful, ^^ he asked again, on December 29th, 
1879, " to those who are freemen, and whose fathers had 
been freemen, and who hope that their children will be 
freemen, and who consider that freedom is an essential 
condition of civil life, and that without it you can have 
nothing great and nothing noble in political societ}^ — that 
we are led by an administration, and led, I admit, by Par- 
liament, to find ourselves in this position, that we are to 
march upon another body of freemen, and against their 
will to subject them to despotic government?"^ While all 
the winds of the world were carrying Mr. Gladstone's words 
to every corner of the earth, it is not surprising that the 
Boers of the Transvaal, a people '' vigorous, obstinate, and 
tenacious in character even as we are ourselves,"" said Mr. 
Gladstone, should have caught at these encouraging sen- 
tences, and been cheered by them, and animated by them 
to rise against the despotism denounced by a former Prime 
Minister of England, who seemed even then on the high- 
way to become again Prime Minister. They had talked of 
freedom before, and seen their leaders imprisoned; they 
had seen a military administrator. Sir Owen Lanyon, put 
over them in the place of Sir Theophilus Shepstone; now 
they meant to act. 



74 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

For some time there seemed to be no reasonable chance 
of liberty, but in the end of 1880 the Boers saw their oppor- 
tunity. ' They had seen the English defeated at Isandlhana; 
they had seen with how much difficulty the English had at 
last succeeded in conquering and capturing Cetewayo. 
Now in the end of 1880 they saw the Cape colonists en- 
gaged in an uncertain struggle with a native race. The 
cofonists had ordered the disarmament of the Basuto tribe, 
and were unsuccessfully endeavoring to carry out their 
decree upon the rebellious natives. There were few troops 
in the Transvaal. The Boer hour had come. As in most 
insurrections/ the immediate cause of the rising was slight 
enough. A Boer named Bezhuidenot was summoned by 
the landdrost of Potchefstrom to pay a claim made by the 
Treasury officials at Pretoria. Bezhuidenot resisted the 
claim, which certahily apjDcars to have been illegal. Curi- 
ously enough, Bezhuidenot was the son of a Bezhuidenot 
who sixty years before was shot for resisting the law in 
Cape Colony, and was the cause then of a Boer rising. 
The son was destined to be the herald of a new insurrec- 
tion. The landdrost attached a wagon of Bezhuidenot's, 
and announced that it would be sold to meet the claim. 
On November 1 1 the wagon was brought into the open 
square of Potchefstrom, and the sheriff was about to begin 
the sale, when a number of armed Boers pulled him off 
and carried the wagon away in triumph. They were un- 
opposed, as there was no force in the town to resist them. 
The incident, trifling in itself, of Bezhuidenot's cart was 
the match which fired the long-prepared train. Sir Owen 
Lanyon sent some troops to Potchefstrom; a wholly un- 
successful attempt was made to arrest the ringleaders of 
the Bezhuidenot affair; it was obvious that a collision was 
close at hand. While the English authorities were delay- 
ing, uncertain how to act, the Boers were doing their best 
to expedite the crisis. 

On Monday, December 13, 1880, almost exactly a month 
after the affair of Bezhuidenot^s wagon, a mass meeting of 
Boers at Heidelberg proclaimed the Transvaal once again a 
republic, established a triumvirate Government, and pre- 
pared to defend their republic in arms. The triumvirate, 
Paul Kruger, P. Joubert, and M. W. Pretorius, were re- 
markable men. The first who signed his name to the proc- 
lamation which recreated the republic was Stephen Johu 



EliJ'GLA^D UNDER GLADSTOIfE. 75 

Paul Kruger, " Oom " Paul (Uncle Paul), as his people 
fondly called him, a black-haired, black-bearded man of 
some sixty years, of middle height, stooj)ing, and round- 
shouldered, with defective speech. He was one of the origi- 
nal emigrants from the old colony, and a member of 
the strict Protestant Dutch body known as ^^ Doppers/^ 
He had been eminent in many of the Boer and native wars, 
and seems, like many other historical leaders of men, to 
be under the superstitious conviction that he is invulnera- 
ble, and can not be hit by any hostile bullet. Next comes 
Peter Jacob Joubert, a low-set, stout, coarse-looking man, 
with sharp dark eyes beneath beetle brows, ruddy face, and 
full beard and whiskers of a blackish brown. He was 
younger than Kruger, and entirely self-educated. He was 
brought up like a Covenanter on Bible and Psalm-book for 
all literature, and never so much as saw a newspajoer until 
he was nineteen years of age. Like Kruger, he learned how 
to fight in Kaffer wars. Martin Wessel Pretorius was an 
elderly man of great administrative ability, who had 
studied how to rule as alternate president of the Transvaal 
and the Orange Free State. Between these two states it 
was the great but unsuccessful idea of his life to bring- 
about a complete |3olitical and social union. Besides this 
triumvirate, two other Boers call for mention — Dr. E. F. 
Jorrissen, a divine from Holland, deeply learned and fierce 
of temper and spirit, one of the principal authors and or- 
ganizers of the insurrection; and W. Edward Bok, the sec- 
retary of the new republic, a young man of about thirty, a 
master of English, studious, thoughtful, and genial, likely 
to make himself a name. 

The news of the insurrections aroused the Cape Govern- 
ment to a sense of the seriousness of the situation. Move- 
ments of British troojDS were ot once made to put the 
insurgents down with all speed. It is still an unsettled 
point on which side the first shot was fired. There were 
some shots exchanged at Potchefstrom on December 15, when 
a large party of armed Boers entered the town in order to 
get their proclamation printed. In this affair the Boers 
maintain that the English, the English assert that the 
Boers, were the first to commence hostilities. In any case, 
the first blood was drawn, and the first victory gained, by 
the Boers. As soon as the repubhc was proclaimed the 
triumvirate had sent a letter to Sir Owen Lanyon, calling 



76 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

upon him to imitate the action of the Transvaal Govern- 
ment in 1877, and yield up the keys of the Government 
offices without bloodshed. Previously to this the Oith 
regiment had marched from Leydenberg to re-enforce Pre- 
toria on December 5, and had reached Middleburgh about 
a Aveek later. On the way came rumors of the Boer rising, 
and many of the residents of Middleburgh were unwilling 
to allow the regiment to leave. Colonel Anstruther did not 
regard the rumors very serious, and set out with his regi- 
ment for Pretoria. It was not for some days later, until 
the regiment was camped by the Oliphants River, that the 
reports received any serious belief in the minds of its of- 
ficers. Colonel Anstruther seems to have felt convinced 
that the force he had with him was quite strong enough to 
render a good account of any rebels who might attempt to 
intercept its march. The whole strength of his force, 
however, officers included, did not amount to quite 250 
men. The troops crossed the Olii^hants River, left it two 
dafys^ march behind them, and on the morning of the 20th 
were marching quietly along with their long line of wagons 
and their band playing '^ God Save the Queen" under the 
bright glare of the sun. Suddenly, on the rising ground 
near the Bronkhorst Spruit, a body of armed Boers appeared. 
A man galloi^ed out from among them — Paul de Beer — 
with a flag of truce. 

Colonel Anstruther rode out to meet him, and received a 
sealed dispatch, warning the colonel that the British ad- 
vance would be considered ks a declaration of war. Colonel 
Anstruther replied simjDly that he was ordered to go to Pre- 
toria, and that he should do so. Each man galloped back 
to his own force, and firing began. In ten minutes the 
fight, if fight it can be called, was over. The Boers were 
unrivaled sharpshooters, had marked out every officer; 
every shot was aimed, and every shot told. The Boers 
were well covered by trees on rising ground; the English 
were beneath them, had no cover at all, and were com- 
pletely at their mercy. In ten minutes all the officers had 
fallen, some forty men were killed, and nearly double the 
number wounded. Colonel Anstruther, who was himself 
badly woimded, saw that he must either surrender or have 
all his men shot down, and he surrendered. The wounded 
and the survivors were taken prisoners. While the fight 
was going on, and defeat was inevitable. Conductor Eger- 



ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 77 

ton, a brave and gallant gentleman, liid the regimental 
colors under his coat, and so concealed them from the 
eager eyes of the victorious Boers. Egerton got permission 
to go to Pretoria for medical assistance, but he was refused 
a horse, and allowed to carry no weapon. There were 
forty miles between him and Pretoria. For eleven hours 
he marched along, keeping often out of the main road for 
fear of being surprised by parties of Boers with the pre- 
cious colors around his body. All that day and part of 
the night, for eleven weary hours Egarton marched, and in 
the early morning, with feet blistered and bleeding from 
his tramp, he staggered into Pretoria with the news of the 
defeat, but with the colors safe about him. The rescued 
colors were given to Colonel Gildea of the Eoyal Scots 
Fusiliers, who, with graceful courtesy, wound them inside 
those of his own regiment. 

Sir Bartle Frere called this affair a ^' treacherous sur- 
prise '' and " a massacre," but such terms were hardly fair. 
The accounts of the affair given by Colonel Anstruther 
and Conductor Egerton on the one side, and by Paul de 
Beer on the other, show that fair warning was given by the 
Boers' determination to regard the British advance as an 
act of war. The Boers' victory was due to their superior 
numbers and better position, but above all to their excel- 
lence in shooting, which enabled them, like Swiss marks- 
men, to make every shot tell. Colonel Anstruther, who 
afterward died of his wounds, bore high tribute in his dis- 
patch to the kindness and humanity of the Boers when 
once the fight was done. 

A few days after the defeat of the 94th the fiercest indig- 
nation was aroused among the English by the news that 
one of the prisoners in the hands of the Boers, Captain 
Elliott, the paymaster of the defeated regiment, had been 
murdered while crossing from the Transvaal into the 
Orange Free State. Captain Elliott, with Captain Lam- 
bart of the 21st Royal Scots Fusiliers, who had been capt- 
ured by the Boers a couple of days before the engagement 
at Bronkhorst Spruit, had been liberated on giving their 
words of honor that they would leave the Transvaal at 
once, and not bear arms against the Dutch again during 
the war. They were conducted to the Orange Eiver, and 
while trying to cross it at night their escort fired upon 
them, instantly killing Captain Elliott. Lambart swam 



78 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

for his life, climbed the opposite bank, and ran, the escort 
firing at him Avhenever the lightning showed his retreating 
figure. He managed to escape unhurt, however, to tell 
his tale. Sir George Colley, the Military Commissioner, 
at once wrote to the Republican Government, who imme- 
diately disclaimed all knowledge of the murder, but 
promised to do their utmost to bring the offenders to 
justice. At the same time the Boer triumvirate protested 
bitterly against the shelling of Potchefstrom, the order of .. 
Colonel Bellairs to fire on all armed parties approaching i 
his position whether under a flag of truce or not, the * 
actually firing on a burgher, C. Bodenstein, outside 
Potchefstrom, while under a flag of truce, and of the lan- 
guage habitually used by the British leaders tow^ard the 
rebellion, and concernmg the fight at the Bronkhorst 
Spruit. 

Sir George Colley struggled bravely for a wdiile to make 
head against the Boers. At Lang's Nek and Ingogo he did 
his best, and the men under him fought gallantly, but the 
superior positions and marksmanship of the Boers gave 
them the advantage in both fights. Under their murderous 
fire the officers and men fell heljDlessly. Officer after officer 
of a regiment would be shot down by the unerring aim of 
the Boers while trying to rally his men, w^hile the British 
fire did comparatively slight damage, and the troo2os seldom 
came to sufficiently close quarters to use the bayonet. But 
the most fatal battle of the camj^aign was yet to come. Sir 
Evelyn Wood had arrived at the Cape with re-enforcements, 
had met Sir George Colley, and had gone to Pietermaritz- 
burg to await the coming of further re-enforcements. On 
Saturday night, February 26, Sir George Colley, with a 
small force, moved out of the cam]) at Mount Prospect, 
and occuj^ied the Majuba Hill, which overlooked the Boer 
camps on the flat beyond Lang's Kek. Early next morn- 
ing the Boers attacked the hill; there was- some desultory 
firing for a while, under cover of wdiich three Boer storm- 
ing parties ascended the hill almost unseen. The British 
were outflanked and surrounded, a deadly fire was poured 
in upon them from all sides. The slaughter was excessive. 
As usual the officers were soon shot down. Sir George 
Colley, who was directing the movements as coolly as if at 
review, was killed just as he was giving orders to cease 
firing. The British broke and fied, fired upon as they fled 



EKGLAND UKDER GLADSTONE. 79 

Idj the sharpshooters. Some escaped; a large number were 
taken prisoners. Sa disastrous a defeat had seldom fallen 
upon British arms. The recent memory of Maiwand was 
quite obliterated. That was the last episode of the war. 
General Wood agreed to a temporary armistice. There had 
been negotiations going on between the Boers and the 
British before the Majuba Hill defeat, which need never 
have occurred if there had not been a delay in a reply of 
-Kruger^s to a letter of Sir George Oolley^s. 

The negotiations were now resumed, and concluded in 
the establishment of peace, on what may be called a Boer 
basis. The republic of the Transvaal was to be re-estab- 
lished, with a British protectorate and a British Eesident 
indeed, but practically granting the Boers the self-govern- 
ment for which they took up arms. There was some 
€lamor in England at the terms made with the Boers. The 
curtain ought not, so some argued, to have been allowed to 
come down upon a British defeat. Many even who were 
willing enough to grant the Boers their liberty were still of 
opinion that the disaster of Majuba Hill should have been 
effaced by some signal victory over the Boers; that we ought 
not to treat with them at all until they had been severely 
punished for their successive victories. On the other hand, 
the Boers were fighting for the freedom which a very large 
proportion of Englishmen thought they deserved; they may 
now be admitted to have fought fairly and well. It was 
known that the British Government intended to grant their 
demand; why then should the concession have been pre- 
ceded by an act of savage retaliation? The misfortune was 
that the Government had not seen their way to come to 
terms with the Transvaal Boers before Bronkhorst Spruit, 
Eang^s Hek, Ingogo, and Majuba Hill fights. It was a pity 
that Mr. Gladstone had declared shortly after the rising 
that the demands of the Boers could not possibly be granted 
while they were in arms against the authority of the Queen. 
The Liberal policy had all along been opposed to the an- 
nexation of the Transvaal. It would have been truer to 
itself, and have saved the lives of many brave men, if it had 
acted on its principles at once when it had the power, and 
not waited until victory after victory of the Boers gave 
some color to the suggestion that the liberty of the Trans- 
vaal had been wrung from England by force of arms; that 
the Liberal Government had granted to military success 



80 ENGLAJ^D UNDEK GLADSTONE. 

what it would not grant to justice. Of course, no one 
doubts that in the end the English would have been vic- 
torious. A soldier like Sir Evelyn Wood, with the forces that 
England would have been able to send out, could, of course, 
have inflicted crushing defeats upon the Boers. But it would 
have necessitated the presence of a large standing army to 
keep the Boers in subjection, and their independence would 
have to be granted sooner or later. Better sooner, then, 
without any further loss of brave lives, any further waste 
of blood. 

The history of each of the towns besieged by the Boers 
would be in itself a little Iliad of gallant defense. In every 
case the beleaguered garrison behaved with a courage that 
recalled and rivaled the records of Jellalabad and Cawn- 
pore. Outside Pretoria a military camp was formed, and 
the town abandoned by its inhabitants, who came within 
the British lines. This camp, under the command of Colonel 
Bellairs, held its own from December until March and 
the proclamation of peace. The hardships of the siege ap- 
pear to have been considerably lightened by the genial 
presence of Mr. Charles Du-Val, a wandering showman, 
who happened to be touring in the Transvaal when the war 
broke out, and who threw in his lot with those who held the 
camp at Pretoria. He promptly set wp a newspaper, ^'' The 
News of the (?>amp,^^ a journal occupying as curious and 
as interesting a place in periodical literature as The " Canda- 
har News," with which some of the companions of General 
Primrose amused their imi^risonment. The Potchefstrom 
garrison were less fortunate though no less heroic than the 
Pretorians. When the Boers came riding into the market 
square to get their proclamation printed. Major Clarke and 
a few men occupied the court-house; some others occupied 
the jail; the fort outside the town was held by Colonel 
Winslow. ^ The Boers occupied the building in the market 
square, and a running fire was maintained for three days 
between them and the holders of the jail and court-house. 
Then when the Boers were about to fire the court-house 
Major Clarke surrendered, and he and his men were made 
prisoners. The occupants of the jail managed, under cover 
of a wet night, to make their escape to the fort, inside 
which many of the towns-people had taken refuge. There 
were English women and children in the fort. A few of 
the women were at first allowed by the Boer commandant. 



EKGLAN^D Uli[DEIl GLADSTONE. 81 

Oronje^ to return to the town; then in spite of the repeated 
requests of Colonel Winslow^ he refused to allow any more 
to come out. One of the Englishwomen died in the fort 
from the sufferings of the siege; one of the English girls 
was killed^ another wounded by the Boer fire. 

For three months the besieged held out under terrible 
privations from the want of water. Then they surrendered 
with all the honors of war. This surrender was afterward 
very properly reversed by the Boer Government^ as it had 
been made after the conclusion of the amnesty^ all knowl- 
edge of which had been carefully kept from Colonel Winslow 
by Cronje. Oronje alleged that the British destroyed their 
ammunition and spiked their cannon before surrendering^, 
contrary to the Geneva rules; and, on the other hand^ 
Winslow complained of the Dutch use of explosive bullets. 
Of the other forts, Standerton, on the north bank of the 
Vaal Eiver, held out till the armistice, under Major Mon- 
tague; so did Leydenberg, under Lieutenant Long; so did 
Marabastadt, under Captain Brooke; so did Eustenberg, 
under Captain Auchinleck and Lieutenant Despard; and 
Wakkerstrom, under Captain Saunders. Utrecht and 
Middleburgh had been seized by the Boers without resist- 
ance on the beginning of hostilities. It would have been 
quite impossible to defend them. After peace was made a 
convention was concluded at Pretoria, which was not con- 
sidered satisfactory by the people of either country. We 
may as well here somewhat forestall events^ in order to 
bring this portion of our story to a conclusion. For some 
years incessant negotiations were carried on between tha 
Home Government and the new rulers of the TransvaaL 
It was not until many ideas had been exchanged, and Boer 
delegates had crossed the seas to interview Lord Derby at 
the Colonial Office, that anything like a solution of the 
difficulty was arrived at. At last, on Ash-Wednesday, 
February 27, 1884, the anniversary of the battle of Majuba- 
Hill, a new Transvaal convention was signed at the Colo- 
nial Office by Sir Hercules Eobinson as representing the 
Queen, and by the delegates of what was henceforward to 
be called the South African Eepublic. By the convention 
the South African Eepublic obtained what was practically^ 
though not absolutely, complete independence. All the 
rights which the Boers exercised over the Transvaal pre- 
Tious to the visitation of Sir Theophilus Shepstone were 



82 ElJl^GLAifD UNDER GLADSTONE. 

conceded, under certain conditions. These conditions pro- 
hibited the introduction of slavery into the country, pre- 
scribed complete religious liberty, and stipulated that the 
native races should be allowed the right to buy land and to 
have access to the courts. The Transvaal debt was re- 
duced from £385,000 to £250,000, and a sinking fund was 
established to provide for its extinction altogether in a 
quarter of a century. Furthermore, the British Govern- 
ment reserved to itself a right of veto over any treaties 
that the South African Republic might conclude with any 
foreign power. The Home ' Government was especially 
anxious to secure the rights and well-being of the border 
tribes of native race. The Eev. Mr. Mackenzie, a strong 
sympathizer with the native races, although not a very 
popular person vv^ith the ojDpressively anti-black African- 
ders, was appointed British Eesident in Bechuanaland. 
The resuscitated republic was further required to pledge 
itself not to make any treaties with native races to east or 
w-est of its territories without the sanction of the British 
Government. 

To these terms the Boers not unnaturally agreed. The 
inde^Dendence for which they had fought so well and so 
successfully w^as practically conceded to them, for the 
Orown^s nominal right to veto was but a slight check, pos- 
sibly never to be used against the now formally recognized 
'^ republic."^ On the other hand the restraint put upon 
their encroachments into the lands of the native .races was 
undoubtedly irksome to the Boers. But upon that point 
the Government was firm. It was willing to give up the 
suzerainty for which it had waged so unfortunate a war; it 
was willing to abandon its " British Resident " in the 
Transvaal; but it would not abandon the native tribes of 
Goshen and Stellaland, Zulu and Swaziland, to the mercy 
of the freebooters of the " Afrikaner Traditie. " On these 
terms, then, and for the time being at least, the Boers and 
the British were friends again. 

The new Ministry was not able to do very much in the 
way of domestic legislation. Other questions occupied the 
greater part of the broken session which the Liberals had 
left to them of the year. Still they accomplished nothing. 
The first business of importance was the Supplementary 
Budget, introduced by Mr. Gladstone on Thursday, June 
10, 1880. The revenue had been fixed at. £82,260,000, 



ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 8^ 

and the expenditure at £82^076,000^ leaving a surplus of 
£184,000, which had, however, been swallowed up by 
£200,000 of supplementary estimates. He was then un- 
able to make any definite proposal with regard to the claim 
in connection with the Indian deficiency. The Govern- 
ment 23roposals were to reduce the duties on light foreign 
wines; to exchange a beer tax for the existing malt tax; to 
meet any loss occasioned by these measures by an increase 
of one penny to the income tax; with a j^lan for increasing 
and adjusting the license duties for the sale of alcoholic 
liquors. The general result of the Budget was that 
£1,100,000 of revenue was sacrificed by the abolition of the 
malt tax, and £233,000 by the reduction of the wine duties,, 
which, with the £200,000 supplementary, made an expen- 
diture of £1,533,000. On the other side, the addition to 
the income tax was reckoned at £1,425,000, and the in- 
creased license duties at £305,000, which, with the surplus 
of £184,000 provided by Sir Stafford Northcote, made an 
addition to the revenue of £1,914,000, leaving a final surplus 
of £381,000. The Budget was, on the whole, satisfactory 
to the followers of the Government, and was acce23ted with 
but slight modification. Some of the Irish and Scotch 
members had objections to raise to the unequal taxation of 
alcohol in whisky. The wine duty clauses, being dejoend- 
ent upon the successful negotiation of a new commercial 
treaty with France, were withdrawn. Of course, the addi- 
tional penny on the income tax caused considerable 
grumbling. The absence of any statement with regard to 
the Indian deficiency was felt to be somewhat unsatisfactory 
by many wdio, like Sir George Campbell, were curious to 
know where the money was to come from. 

The Indian Budget was not formally inquired into until 
August 17, but it was known to Parliament long before 
that it was to prove alarmingly disappointing. The cost 
of the w^ar in Afghanistan down to the end of the financial 
year 1879-80 was shown to have been underestimated by 
the Government of India, and by its Finance Minister, Sir 
John vStrachey, by several millions sterling. The estimated 
six millions had now swelled into something like fifteen 
millions, which, if the frontier railway charge were to be 
included, would be still further swelled to some eighteen 
millions. Lord Hartington declined to make any definite 
statement as to how he proposed to meet this great defi.- 



84 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

ciency so long as the exact amount of deficit remained un- 
ascertained, but he pledged the Government to make some 
contribution toward meeting the war expenses from the 
Imperial Treasury, without, however, making any specific 
statement as to what form the contribution would take. 
Indian finances aj^art from the war charges were not un- 
l^leasing. In the three years from 1878 to 1880 there was 
an aggregate surplus of over eleven millions. This sur- 
plus, however, as well as a projected famine fund^ were, of 
course, devoured by the increased war estimates. A curi- 
ous example of the loose management of Indian finance 
was shown by the fact that some five millions and a half of 
the excess over the estimate had already been paid by the 
Indian Government before it was known that it was due. 
The deficit that remained was to be met, at least tempora- 
rily, by the means of loans. 

A Burial Bill was brought forward in the Upper House 
by the Lord Chancellor, to permit' the celebration of Non- 
conformist services in church-yards. This had long been a 
strong 23oint with Dissenters, and it had formed the basis 
of Mr. Osborne Morgan^s measure which had been rejected 
in the former Ministry. Some attempts were made in the 
Lords to narrow the scope of the Government measure by 
ingenious amendments limiting the working of the Bill to 
places where no separate provision was made for burying 
Dissenters; but these amendments were smoothed away 
when the Bill j^assed into the LoAver House, and the Lords 
made no attempts to put them back again. 

Mr. Dodson introduced a Vaccination Bill for the remis- 
sion of cumulative penalties; but it met with so much op- 
position, both inside the House and out of doors, that Lord 
Hartington had to announce, at the beginning of the second 
week of August, that the Government had made up their 
minds to abandon the measure. There still remained the 
Ground Game Bill, which was the chief piece of legislative 
work accomplished during the session. This was Sir 
William Harcourfs measure, and it was destined to cause 
a great many debates indeed before it finally became law. 
The Bill proposed to give farmers a right to kill ground 
game concurrent with that of the landlords, and inalienable 
by contract. The measure had the support of the farming 
classes generally, but the landlord party were, as a whole, 
opposed to it on the grounds of its interference with terri- 



EKGLAND UKDER GLADSTONE. 85 

torial privilege, with rights of property, with freedom of 
contract, and the hke. The second reading was moved for 
on June 10, but it was not obtained for many weeks later; 
and when the Bill was finally carried to the Lords, it was 
not suffered to pass without remonstrance and ineffectual 
opposition. Two amendments were added — one limiting 
the rights of shooting to the tenant or to one other person 
to be named by him; and another amendment proposed to 
establish a close time from March to August, during which 
no shooting was to be allowed. When the Bill came back 
to the Commons this close time was rejected, and the right 
of shooting was extended to the tenant and one other per- 
son authorized by him. In these final changes the Lords 
quietly agreed. 

The Employers^ Liability Bill, introduced by Mr. Dodson, 
was more fortunate than his vaccination measure. It 
proposed to alter the legalized relations existing between 
master and workman, by which at that time an employer 
was practically free from all responsibility toward his work- 
people in case of accident, unless it was proved that his own 
personal negligence was the cause of the injury. The Bill 
proposed to amend the condition of the law by making the 
master responsible in cases where his immediate delegate, 
or any person implied to be such, was the cause of the ac- 
cident, though this did not go far enough to please the ad- 
Tocates of the working-men. When the Bill went to the 
Lords in August, Lord Beaconsfield mtroduced an amend- 
ment limiting its duration to two years, but this limitation 
was extended in the Commons again to seven years, and 
the extension was not opposed by the House of Lords. 

Other measures passed during the session were Mr. Faw- 
cett^s Bill for the extension of the Postal Savings Bank 
system, and the introduction of Postal Notes. Mr. Faw- 
cett, since his appointment to the Postmaster-Generalship, 
had been studying his new office very carefully, and dis- 
tinguished himself by the rapidity with which he was able 
to introduce two new and valuable measures of reform. The 
Bill for extending the system of Post-Office Savings Banks 
proposed to allow single depositors to deposit sums to the 
amount of £300 instead of the existing limitation of £200, 
and to increase the total sum that might be deposited by 
any one person in a single year from £30 to £100. The 
Bill further proposed to give depositors certain facilities 



86 ENGLAND UlfDER GLADSTONE. 

for the conversion of a portion of their savings into Gov- 
ernment Stock inider certain limitations. It contained 
certain other changes as well. When the Post-Office Sav- 
ings Banks were established in 1861, the Commissioners 
for the Reduction of the National Debt were bound to allow 
the trustees of the old previously established private savmgs 
banks interest to the amount of 3^ per cent on the money 
that they had transferred to the new banks. This was 
what might be called a fancy interest, much higher than 
the Government could properly afford to give; they only 
gave their own depositors 2^ per cent. , and there had been 
a financial deficiency slowly growing up in consequence. 
This it was now proposed to meet by reducing the interest 
of the trustees to 3 per cent. This slight reduction was 
regarded by the trustees and their supporters witli much 
disfavor, while, on the other hand, it was considered not 
nearly large enough by the advocates of the younger system 
of banking. The Post-Office Money Order Bill proposed 
to increase the facilities for the interchange of small sums 
which tlie Post-Office Order system had established, by 
issuing notes for the various small sums, ranging from one 
shilling to one pound, at jDrices ranging from a halfpenny 
to two-pence per note, and which were changeable at sight 
like an ordinary check. It really did in fact, in some 
measure, establish a j^aj^er currency of small denominations. 
Both these measures became law, and have since worked 
exceedingly satisfactorily. 

Census Bills for taking the census of the three kingdoms 
in 1881 were also carried. In the Irish measure the inquiry 
into religion was made optional, while in the English and 
Scotch Bills it was, as usual, excluded. A Grain Cargoes 
Bill was also passed, and the Expiring Laws Continuance 
Bill, including the renewal of the Ballot Act. 

Two extraneous debates are worth noticing in this session. 
One was on a motion brought forward by Mr. Briggs, con- 
demning the erection of a tablet to the memory of the 
Prince Imperial in Westminster Abbey. Public opinion 
was much stirred by this question, and all the anti-Bona- 
parte feeling in the country was aroused. Mr. Swinburne 
wrote a brilliant and bitter sonnet in which he bade " scorn 
everlasting and eternal shame" to '^^eat out the rotting 
record " of Dean Stanley^s name for proposing to erect a 
a monument in England^s abbey to the heir of the Napo- 



ENGLAND TTXDEE GLADSTONE. 87 

leons. Mr. Briggs carried liis motion, and the tablet was 
not erected. The other debate was raised by Mr. OTjon- 
nell;, on the nomination of M. Challemel Lacour as embas- 
sador of France to England. Mr. O^Donnell attacked M. 
Challemel Lacour for his acts during the Commune. Mr. 
Olad stone moved that Mr. CDonnell be no longer heard, 
and this revival of a custom that had fallen out of use for 
i5ome couple of centuries provoked a long and wrangling 
debate. 

In the end of July Mr. Gladstone was seized with a slight 
lever. For a few days there was great anxiety as to his health, 
and there were incessant inquiries at the house in Downing 
Street, Lord Beaconsfield^s name being conspicuous among 
the callers. Then it was announced that Mr. Gladstone 
had recovered, but his medical advisers would not allow 
him to return to political life for a time. Mr. Gladstone 
went for a cruise in the '' Grantully Castle/^ one of Sir Don- 
ald Curriers vessels, and did not return to Parliament until 
September 4, three days before the session ended. During 
his absence the position of leader of the House of Commons 
was naturally taken by Lord Hartington, who managed the 
duty as he had managed it before during Mr. Gladstone's 
polemical retirement, with the sturdy determination char- 
acteristic of him, and which, if not representative of the 
highest order of statesmanship, is certainly not undeserving 
in its way of admiration. 

Two days before the year came to an end, on Wednesday, 
December 29, 1880, one of the greatest novelists of the 
nineteenth century passed away. The impression that 
'' George Eliot " had made upon her age was profound and 
lasting; to a really large number of thoughtful people, 
men and women, her novels supplied not merely a philoso- 
phy, but a religion. The tendency of her admirers to re- 
gard George Eliot thus as a teacher and prophetess rather 
than as an artist and romancist is, perhaps, to be regretted 
because of the impression it produced upon her later work. 
The devotees of the George Eliot cult were inspired by an 
almost Bacchic frenzy of enthusiasm, ready at all times to 
turn and rend, as Agave and her companions rent Pentheus 
in the weird Cadmeian forest, any adventurer bold enough 
to find any fault with their idol. All this was bad for the 
idol, and its evil effects are painfully visible in her later 
works. George Eliot was a great novelist as Thackeray 



88 EKGLAl^D UNDER GLADSTONE. 

and Dickens and Jane Austen were great novelists. Her 
Tullivers and Poysers and Bedes and Marners, even her 
fifteenth century Florentines, these are precious possessioAS 
in the illimitable world of fiction, rare and welcome pres- 
ences in the cloud country of romance. She was essentially 
a great novelist, a wonderful delineator of certain kinds of 
characters, an excellent teller of a certain kind of stoiy^ a 
deep thinker in certain veins of thought. The mistake of 
her admirers — of the admirers, that is, who did not know 
what to admire her for — was to attempt to make her a 
scientific Moses the lawgiver, a feminine London Socrates. 
As well attempt to reason out a system of domestic ethics 
from the early verses of Mr. Swinburne, or to discover the 
hidden princij)les of political government in the romances 
of Charlotte Bronte. To George Eliot the story-teller, the- 
inimitable painter of character, let us be grateful with all 
our hearts, as in the one case we are to the compilers of 
the ^' Thousand and One Nights,'" whose names have 
perished, or in the other to the author of the '^ Comedie 
Humaine. " But to George Eliot the Positivist, iliQ scientific 
thinker, the expounder of life-laws and life-theories, we 
might have been grateful had she written scientific treatises 
or volumes on ethics, instead of allowing these faculties ta 
spoil her later stories. Let us, indeed, be thankful that, 
in her list, there are not many novels like " Daniel Deronda,'* 
even while we regret that we have not more like ^' Silas 
Marner,"' ^^ Adam Bede," ''^ The Mill on the Floss," and 
^^Romola." 

Many striking names, if no other very great name, dis- 
appear from the list of the living in 1880. Two belong to 
politicians of widely different types. Lord Stratford de 
Eedcliffe was a very old man, ninety-two, when he died. The 
school of dij^lomacy to which he belonged had j^ractically 
passed away long before him; at least, all the conditions of 
diplomacy in the fields Avhich were j^eculiarly his own had 
altered almost beyond recognition. Durmg his long career 
Lord Stratford de Eedclift'e was able to render many valu- 
able services to his country, and none more valuable than 
that which he gave when he saw through the Russian 
schemes ii; the Vienna note of 1853. Lord Stratford de 
Eedcliffe had the curious fortune to win the profound ad^ 
miration of one clever literary man, and the profound dis- 
like of another. To Mr. Kinglake Lord Stratford de Red- 



ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE, 89 

€liffe was scarcely less than inspired^, and the historian of 
the Crimean war writes of the '' great Eltchi ^' as some en- 
thusiast might write of one of the Hebrew prophets. Mr. 
Grenville Murray ;, the once renowned '^'^Eoving English- 
man,^^ saw no such merits in the Constantinople embassa- 
dor; he presented portraits of him in his writings which 
resulted in something like a public scandal, and in the with- 
drawal of Mr. Grenyille Murray from the diplomatic post 
he held at that time. 

Lord Hampton was a statesman of a very different kind. 
He was known as Sir John Pakington during that part of 
his pohtical career which had any importance, though his 
importance was never very great, and was generally unfort- 
unate for his party. He was chiefly remarkable for a genial 
alacrity in accepting any office that might come in his way, 
without any self-searchings as to his own peculiar capacity 
or incapacity for the post. On only one occasion was he 
ever conspicuously brought before the eyes of his country- 
men, and that was in 1867, when his marvelous incapacity 
for keeping a secret told the story of the Ten Minutes^ 
Bill, and revealed the whole of the hidden history of the 
struggles of Mr. Disraeli and his colleagues with the Eef orm 
question. 

Among the other emiment men who died during the 
year perhaps Sir Alexander Oockburn was the most remark- 
able. From the day of the fierce debate over Don Pacifico 
and Lord Palmerston^s policy of Roman citizenship, in 
1850, the career of Mr. Cockburn was a series of successes. 
The speech he delivered in that debate was the brilliant 
preface to a brilliant career. In a career that was hence- 
forward all of brightness, one or two episodes shine out 
with special distinctness. One was when he delivered his 
charge to the Grand Jury in the historic Jamaica trials. 
Carlyle, with his characteristic hatred of ''^niggers," might 
write from Chelsea to tell Alexander Cockburn that, far 
before and above the British law, there was a martial law 
which privileged the white man to flog the dark man and 
the dark woman, but the world will remember in Sir 
Alexander Cockburn^s charge one of the finest and most 
eloquent defenses of civil law against outrage and violence 
that was ever delivered from the judicial bench. 

By the death of Mr. Tom Taylor dramatic literature lost 
Si copious and creditable writer, and '' Punch " a conscien- 



90 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

tious editor. Literature of a certain kind lost J. K.. 
Planche^ Pierce Egan the younger, and W. H. G. Kings- 
ton, the boys^ novelists. Natural science suffered by the 
death of Mr. Frank Buckland, who had earned honorable 
distinction as a naturalist, and rendered good service to his 
country in his work as Commissioner of Fisheries. 

A- career which had at one time seemed j^romi sing came 
to a poor conclusion in this year. Dr. Kenealy, who had 
got into the old Parliament as an advocate of the case of 
the ^'Claimant/" and as the representative of the Magna^ 
Charta Association, had stood again for Stoke at the Gen- 
eral Election and been defeated. He did not long survive 
his defeat. He was a man of considerable natural abilities, 
who had at one j^eriod promised to do well and to go far. 
In his youth he had been an almost brilliant speaker; he 
had a fair acquaintance with a variety of language8> and 
could turn oft* clever translations and imitations that were 
not much inferior to these of his witty countryman. Father 
Prout. He had written verse which had nothing very re- 
markable in it, and had prefaced one of his efforts with a 
dedication to Mr. Disraeli, which might well have been 
called fulsome, and which was recalled to Dr. Kenealy's 
disadvantage in after-years, when he had made himself 
conspicuous by the oft^ensive virulence of his attacks upon 
his former hero. In the House of Commons he was a com- 
i^lete failure. The showy oratory of his youth had quite 
deserted him; he was heavy, dull, and uninteresting. He 
had entered the House of Commons with great announce- 
ments of what he was going to do, and he did nothing. 
He subsided, and was almost forgotten before the General 
Election brought about his defeat, and was followed by his 
death. His dis2:)Osition was an unhappy one, which had 
always led him into quarrels and dissensions, and had an- 
imated him, a2:>i3arently, only with an intense desire for 
notoriety of any kind, and at almost any price. In his 
private and 23ublic life he contrived for a time to make 
himself conspicuous. He may be regretted for his wasted 
life, and for the abilities Avhich, had they been better em- 
ployed, might have earned him honorable and deserved dis- 
tinction. 



ElfGLAHD UNDER GLADSTONE. 91 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE. IKISH DIFFICULTY. 

Early in its career the Ministry had a more serious dif- 
ficulty to encounter than the question of a member^s right 
to affirm. The new Ministry might, without great exag- 
geration, be said to have scarcely been in office many hours 
before they were confronted by the Irish question, and 
under conditions which rendered it especially difficult to 
deal with. 

In oader to properly understand the exact condition of 
affairs in Ireland at the moment Mr. Gladstone took office, 
in 1880, it is necessary to consider some of the events that 
took place under the preceding Ministry, and even earlier. 
When Mr. Gladstone went out of office in 1874, he had pass- 
ed two great Irish measures, and had tripped himself and 
his administration up over a third. The measure which 
overthrew him was the Irish University Education Bill; the 
measures which he carried disestablished the Irish Church, 
and created the Land Act of 1870. With the land question 
before the passing of that Act we have here nothing to do. 
The Act had recognized that there was need of reform in 
the Irish land system, and it strove to effect that reform. 
The Land Act of 1870 endeavored, first, to give the tenant 
some security* of tenure; second, to encourage the making 
of improvements throughout the country; and, third, to 
promote the establishment of a. peasant proprietorship. It 
sought to further the first and second of these aims by le- 
galizing the Ulster tenant right on farms where it al- 
ready existed, and by allowing compensation for disturb- 
ance and for improvements to evicted tenants on farms 
where the Ulster tenant-right system did not prevail. Up 
to this time the Ulster tenant-right custom was not rec- 
ognized by law, and as it differed widely in different es- 
tates, it was not very easy to define strictly. Roughly 
speaking, however, it maintained, for those who were bound 
to it by time and tradition, first, that the tenant was not 
to be evicted so long as he paid his rent and acted proper- 
ly, his landlord having, indeed, the right of raising the 
rent from time to time, though not so high as to destroy 



92 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

the tenant^s interest; second, that the tenant who wished 
to leave his holding had a right to sell his interest in the 
farm, subject to the landlorcPs consent to receive the new 
purchaser as a tenant; third, that if the landlord wanted to 
take the land himself, he must pay a fair sum for the ten- 
ant right. 

It may be fairly said that, wherever the Ulster tenant-right 
custom existed, the relationship between landlord and tenant 
was reasonably good. On estates where the custom of any- 
thing like it did not prevail, the tenant had practically no 
rights as against the landlord. The majority of Irish ten- 
ancies were tenancies from year to year. These might at 
any time be ended by the landlord, after due notice. A 
comparatively small proportion of tenancies were let on 
leases which gave the tenant security of possession for a 
considerable period, so long as he could pay the yearly 
rent, or the landlord did not press too heavily for arrears. 
In neither case had the tenant any right to claim on 
eviction compensation for disturbance, or for any improve- 
ments he might have made in the land; and in Ireland, 
except on a few " English-managed'"' estates, the improve- 
ments are always made by the tenants. In the yearly ten- 
ancies, the landlord had always the powder of raising the 
rent when he j^leased; in estates held on lease, he could 
raise it at the expiration of the lease, and, as a rule, the 
landlord or his agent always did so raise the rent whenever 
the exertions of the tenant had made the land of more 
value than when he had entered it. Undoubtedly, one of 
the reasons for the wretched condition of so many Irish 
farms and cabins was that the tenant feared, and often 
justly feared, that the smallest sign of well-being, the least 
evidence of improvement of any kind, would be taken by 
the landlord or his agent as a sure sign that he might safely 
raise the rent. Raising the rent was the one great dread 
of the tenant. So great was the poverty of the average 
tenant that, in many cases, it was almost impossible to pay 
any rent at all, and the prospect of having the existing 
rent raised was terror. The Irish peasant is, as a rule,, 
profoundly unwilling to emigrate. He loves his land with 
a passion which defies starvation, and he will make any 
sacrifices and run any risks to remain at home. Of those 
who do emigrate, the majority always dream of returning, 
and many do return, to their native land. The land is the 



EKGLAN^D UNDER GLADSTONE. 9S 

love, but it is also the life, of the Irish peasant. If he re- 
mains in Ireland, he has nothing else to live upon, and he 
is ready to take the land on any terms the landlord chooses 
to make, trusting to Providence to see him safely through 
with his rent at the due time, or hoping that the landlord 
may be found easy-going and unexacting. Furthermore, 
the Irish peasant is in his heart convinced that the land is 
really his; that the landlord, to whom he pays his rent, and 
the agent, to whom he touches his hat, are alike, whatever 
their nationality, the representatives of an alien rule, of a 
coercion which is no conquest. 

Evictions were the great misery of the peasantry. Evic- 
tions were often for non-payment of rent, often because the 
landlord wished to clear the ground, and was anxious to 
get rid of his tenants whether they paid their rent or not» 
In the years from 1849 to 1882 inclusive, the evictions 
have been on an average of more than three thousand fami- 
lies a year. The highest rates of eviction were in 1849 and 
1850, the two years immediately following the rising of 
1848, when the rates were 16,686 and 19,949 families in 
each year. The rate was at its lowest in 1869, when the 
number of evicted families was only 374. From 1865 to 
1878 inclusive the number of evictions never got into the 
thousands; in 1879 they were over 1000; in 1880, over 
2000; in 1881 and 1882, over 3000. The Lan:d Act of 
1870 did not lessen evictions, as great numbers of the ten- 
antry in all parts of the country were in heavy arrears of 
rent. In many estates it was practically compulsory -for 
the rent to be in arrears by a process known as the hang- 
ing gale, by which the tenant had always a yearns or half 
a year's rent due and hanging over him, thus giving 
him completely into the landlord's power as regarded 
evictions. 

One of the objects of the Land Act of 1870 was to create 
a peasant proprietary, through the clauses known by the 
name of Mr. Bright. Something of the kind had already 
existed on a very small scale. When the Irish Church was 
disestablished, the Church Temporalities Commissioners 
were given power to aid occupymg tenants of Church lands 
in purchasing their holdings when it was wished. These 
tenants were allowed, on payment of one fourth of the pur- 
chase-money, to leave three fourths of the purchase-money 
on mortgage at four per cent., the principal and the m- 



94 EKGLAND UNDER GLADSTOXE. 

terest to be repaid in half-yearly payments, extending over 
a period of thirty-two years. Nearly three fourths of the 
tenants occupying Church lands did in fact thus 23urchase 
their holdings. It was with the intention of increasing 
such facilities for the purchase of holdings that the Bright 
clauses were introduced. A landlord and a tenant might 
come to an agreement under the Act by wdiich the tenant 
; could purchase his holding, and receive a Landed Estate 
! Court conveyance. The very fact, however, that a Landed 
■ Estate Court conveyance is absolutely binding in its charac- 
ter, and gives its possessor an absolute title to the land 
acquired, to the disregard of any subsequent claims that 
might be made after the sale was effected, made the 
23rocess a costly one. To prevent any mistake in the trans- 
fer of the land, or injury to any third, parties, careful in- 
vestigations had to be made, and elaborate requirements 
gone through, all of which made the process of transfer 
costly and troublesome. The expenses were often from 
ten to thirty per cent, of the price of the farm; in some 
extreme cases the cost of the transference was very con- 
siderably greater than the actual price of the purchased 
land. Moreover, the tithe-rent charges, quit-rents, and 
drainage charges, to which most Irish estates are subject, 
remained with the land instead of being transferred to the 
money in court, and were a fruitful source of trouble to the 
new purchasers. 

All these various conditions combined to make the work- 
ing of the Bright clauses far more limited and unsatisfac- 
tory than had l^een intended by their framers. Thus the 
Act failed to establish a system of peasant proprietorship 
on anything like an extended scale, or indeed on any scale 
large enough to judge of its working by. It did not give the 
ordinary tenant any great degree of security of tenure. It 
allowed him, indeed, the privilege of going to law with his 
landlord, but as in most cases the tenant had little or no 
money, while the landlord could fight out the case from 
court to court, appeal to the law was a privilege of no 
great value to the tenant. The chief thing actually ac- 
complished by the Act was the legalizing of the excellent 
Ulster custom. 

The passing of the Land Act, instead of settling the 
Land question in Ireland, was destined to give it a fresh 
impetus. The year that saw it passed saw also the forma- 



EKGLAKD UKDEK GLADSTONE. 95 

tion of an Irish organization which was to be the cause of 
bringing every phase of the Irish question more prominent- 
ly before the notice of England than at any time since 
O^Oonnell;, if not, indeed, since the Union. On May 19th, 
1870, two months and a few days before the Land Act be- 
came law, a meeting was held in Dublin of representative 
Irishmen of all opinions, and of all political and religious, 
creeds. The object of the meeting was to form an organ- 
ization to advocate the claims of Ireland io some form of 
Home Government. The words " Home Rule '' were lised 
by some one, and they became at once the shibboleth of 
the new party. 

At the General Election of 1874 some sixty Irish mem- 
bers were returned pledged to Home Eule principles, and 
to maintain a separate and distinct j)arty in the House of 
Commons, under the leadership of Mr. Isaac Butt, an 
eminent Protestant lawyer, who, in his youth, had been 
strongly opposed to the O^Oonnell movement. It is 
not necessary here to enter into any explanation of the 
Home Eule demand. It is enough to say that a Home 
Rule motion was annually brought forward by Mr. Butt in 
the House of Commons, and annually outvoted. The more 
active among the Home Rulers became dissatisfied with 
Mr. Butt^s leadership, and began to cast about for a new 
leader. They found him in a young man who had been an 
unnoticed member of the House for a year or two, Mr. 
Charles Stewart Parnell. 

Mr. Parnell was a Protestant, of English descent — he 
was of the family of the poet Parnell, and of Sir Henry 
Parnell, afterward Lord Congieton, the reform ally of 
Lord Gray and Lord Melbourne— a Cambridge man, of ap- 
parently Conservative tendencies. In 1871, after some 
years of travel, in America among other places, he settled 
down on his estate at Avondale in Wicklow, within whose 
boundaries is to be found Moore^s Yale of Avoca with its 
meeting waters. His first attempt to enter political life 
was doubly a failure. He failed to get elected for Dublin, 
and he broke down completely in his first attempt to make 
a public speech. In 1875 he was elected for Meath, but he 
attracted no notice in the House of Commons until 1877, 
when he became the head of a small party of advanced 
Home Rulers, who endeavored to prevent the introduction 
of Government measures at late hours at night by ingen- 



96 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

ions and systematic obstruction. The Irish members did 
not invent obstruction. It had been practiced often before, 
for special purposes, by Liberals and Tories alike. But 
they applied the method with considerable ingenuity and 
consistency. The obstructionists became popular in Ire- 
land in exact proportion to their unpopularity in the House 
of Commons. It was soon evident that the Butt Gironde 
was being greatly embarrassed by the Mountain party, 
which was forming under the headship of Mr. Parnell. 
The early obstruction was on English measures, and was 
carried on often with the active support and co-operation 
of the more advanced members of the Liberal opposition. 
One of the fiercest nights of obstruction was on the South 
Africa Bill, when the Irish party were ably and energetic- 
ally supported by the Eadicals; and not a few Englismen 
would now wish that the obstruction had then been suffi- 
cient to defeat that unlucky measure. Mr. Parnell, 
moreover, carried many useful amendments to the Fac- 
tories and Workshops Bill of 1878, the Prison Code, and 
the Army and Navy Mutmy Bills. It may be fairly said 
that his efforts contributed very appreciably to the aboli- 
tion of fioggmg in the army. 

Meanwhile all dispute or discussion with regard to the 
leadershi]^ of Mr. Butt was settled by the death of Mr. 
Butt himself in 1879, and Mr. Shaw was chosen leader in 
his stead. Mr. Shaw became leader in difficult times. The 
land question was coming up again. Mr. Butt, shortly 
before his death, had predicted its reappearance, and been 
laughed at for his prophecy, but he was soon proved to be 
right. The condition of the peasantry was still very bad, 
their tenure of land precarious. A new land agitation was 
inaugurated by a new man. Mr. Michael Davitt was the 
son of an evicted tenant. He had lost his arm while a 
boy in a machine accident in Lancashire. When a young 
man he joined the Fenian movement, was arrested, and 
sentenced to fifteen years' penal servitude. Seven years 
later he was let out on ticket of leave. During his impris- 
onment he had thought much of the means of bettering 
the condition of Ireland, and had come to the conclusion 
that by constitutional agitation, not by force of arms, the 
improvement could be best accomplished. Mr. Davitt 
went to America, planned out there a scheme of land organi- 
zation, and returned to Ireland to put it into practice. He 



ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 97 

found the condition of the Irish peasant very wretched. 
For three years the harvest had been going from bad to 
worse, and there was danger of a serious famine. Mr. 
Davitt and his friends organized land meetings in various 
parts of Ireland; the new scheme was eagerly responded to 
hy the tenant farmers in all directions. In October, 1879, 
the Irish National Land League was formed. Mr. Davitt 
and some other Land Leaguers were prosecuted for speeches 
made at some of the land meetings, but the prosecutions 
were abandoned. Mr. Parnell went to America to raise 
funds to meet the distress; the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Mr. 
E. D. Oray, M.P., raised a fund at home, so did the 
Duchess of Marlborough. The Government passed certain 
relief measures. The severity of the famine was stayed, 
but neither the Government nor the public and private re- 
lief was able to prevent a great amount of suffering. Such 
was the condition of affairs in Ireland when Lord Beacons- 
field wrote his letter to the Duke of Marlborough, in which 
he attacked the Liberal party for their compromises with 
Irish faction and disaffection. As we have seen, the Irish 
vote in England was in consequence given in almost every 
€ase to the Liberal candidates. In Ireland the Home Eule 
party were largely increased, and in the party itself the 
section that followed Mr. Parnell were soon found to be 
numerically the strongest. At a meeting in Dublin Mr. 
Parnell was formally chosen leader of the party in. the 
place of Mr. Shaw; and in the House of Commons the 
Pamellites, as the advanced party of Irish members were 
now called, took their seats on the OpjDosition side below 
the gangway, while the moderate Home Eulers, under the 
direction of Mr. Shaw, ranged themselves on the Liberal 
Ijenches. 

The new Irish party which followed the lead of Mr. Par- 
nell has been often represented by the humorist as a sort 
of Falstaffian ^^ ragged regiment,"^ and its members as rivals 
of Lazarus in the painted cloth, to whom the mere neces- 
sities of civilized life were luxuries, to obtain which they 
would follow any leader and advocate any cause. From 
dint of repetition this has come to be almost an article of 
faith in some quarters. Yet it is curiously without founda- 
tion. A large proportion of Mr. ParnelFs followers were 
journalists. Journalists unfortunately seldom amass large 
fortunes, but the occupation is not considered dishonorable. 



98 EKGLAKD UNDER GLADSTONE. 

and the journalists who belonged to the Irish party were 
sufficiently intelligent to be able to obtain their livelihood by 
their pens. Mr. T. P. O'Connor, for example, was a young 
Irishman who had come to London, and was making his 
way in English journalism. He was a strong Radical, and 
had written an exceedingly able, if exceedingly one-sided. 
''Life of Lord Beaconsfield. " Mr. Sexton, who was des- 
tined to prove himself one of the foremost debaters in the 
House of Commons, began life in the employment of the" 
Waterford and Limerick Railway Company. When he was 
some twenty years of age he became a writer for the '' Na- 
tion," a newspaper which had upheld through long years 
and under disheartening conditions the traditions of Nation- 
alism which had made it famous in 1848. He had been a 
writer for the/' Nation " for some years when the General 
Election came. Mr. Sexton, like most young Irish jour- 
nalists who ever wrote for the " Nation," had taken the 
keenest interest in Irish politics. He was sent to Sligo to 
oppose Colonel King Harman, an mfluential landlord and 
nominal Home Ruler. So great- was the popular feeling 
for the growing Nationalist party that the almost unknown 
young writer with the eloquent tongue was returned by a 
triumphant majority over the wealthy landlord, his oppo- 
nent, who had come to regard a seat for Sligo as an item of 
his personal property. 

Mr. T. D. Sullivan was another Irish journalist, the 
owner of the " Nation," eminent in Ireland, and not only 
in Ireland, as a true 23oet of the people. Mr. Healy was 
not returned to Parliament at . the General Election. He 
did not enter the House of Commons until November. 
1880, but he may fairly be described with the jDarty which 
he was so soon to join, and of which he Avas already a 
valuable adherent. Mr. Healy came to England at sixteen 
years of age, a poor young man, with his way to make in 
the world. Almost self-educated, he had taught himself, 
besides French and -German, Pitman's short-hand, and 
through his knowledge of phonograj^hy he obtained a situa- 
tion as short-hand clerk in the office of the superintendent 
of the North-Eastern Railway at Newcastle. Later on he 
came to London as the confidential clerk of a floor-cloth 
manufactory, and as the weekly correspondent of the " Na- 
tion. " In this capacity he made the acquaintance of Mr. 
Parnell, whom he accompanied on his American tour in 



EN"GLA]SrD UKDEE GLADSTOKE. 99 

1879. !Prom tliat time Mr. Healy became one of the most 
.prominent of tlie young men who were working for the 
Srationalist cause. He was soon to become one of the most 
prominent and the most important of the Irish Parliament- 
ary party. Mr. James "Kelly was a journalist who had 
been a soldier and a special correspondent in all parts of the 
world. He served in the Foreign Legion of the French 
army against the Arabs at Oran, under Maximilian in 
Mexico, -and had narrowly escaped being shot by the Span- 
iards in Cuba. After accompanying the Emperor of Brazil 
on his tour through America, and following the fortunes 
of the war with the Sioux chief, Sitting Bull, Mr.- O^Kelly 
came to England, and at once took an active part in the 
Home Rule movement then inaugurated by Mr. Butt. An- 
other journalist, one of the most able among the Irish 
members, was Mr. E. D. Gray, the proprietor of the 
'^ Freeman^s Journal/" probably the most valuable news- 
paper property in Ireland. 

Those who were not journalists in the Irish party were 
generally what is called well-to-do. Mr. Dillon had in- 
herited property from his father. Mr. Biggar had retired 
from a very successful connection with the North of Ire- 
land bacon trade. Mr. Richard Power was a country gentle- 
man of position; so was Mr. Mulhallen Marum; so was Mr. 
Redmond; so was Mr. Metge. Mr. Arthur O"0onnor had 
been in the War Office for many laborious years, and had 
retired upon a pension. Dr. Oommins was a successful 
Liverpool lawyer. Mr. John Barry was a prosperous busi- 
ness man; so was Mr. Dawson, Mr. Leamy was a solicitor 
of independent means. Colonel Nolan was an artillery 
officer of distinction. 

One of the most remarkable figures in the ranks of the 
Irish party was Colonel The 0"Gorman Mahon, whose hand- 
some white-haired head and tall form made him conspicu- 
ous in the House. The "Gorman Mahon had played a 
prominent part in Irish politics long before most of his 
present colleagues were born. He had brought 0"Connell 
forward at the time of the Clare election. He had been in 
Parliament some fifty years before his connection with Mr. 
ParnelFs party. The intervening half century he had spent 
in all parts of- the world, soldiering, sailoring, traveling, 
enjoying adventure for its own sake. He had taken a con- 
siderable share in making the history of one of the South 



100 EKGLAKD UN'DER GLADSTONE. 

American republics. Eiimor said of him that at one time 
he was not merely Lord High Admiral of its fleet and 
Generalissimo of its army^ but actually Archbishop of its 
Church. This latter statement, however, must be regarded 
as the merest exaggeration. He was in Parliament again, 
from 1847 to 1852; he came in for the third time in 1879. 
His friends were fond of rallying him on his supposed an- 
tiquity, but there was no young man in the Irish jmrty, or 
indeed in the House of Commons, who carried his head 
more erect, walked with a firmer stej), or showed less evi- 
dence of the weight of years than The O^Gorman Mahon. 

At first there seemed no reason to expect any serious 
reason for disunion between the Irish members and the 
Liberal party. In the previous Parliament the Irish mem- 
bers and the Eadical members had been thrown into fre- 
quent alliance; during the General Election the bonds of 
sympathy between the English Eadicals and the Irish peo- 
ple seemed to have been strengthened. The Irish vote in 
England had been given to the Liberal cause. The Liber- 
al S23eakers and statesmen, without committing themselves 
to any definite line of policy, had manifested friendly sen- 
timents toward Ireland; and though indeed nothing was- 
said which could be construed into a recognition of the 
Home Rule claim, still the new Ministry was known ta 
contain men favorable to that claim. The Irish members 
hoped for much from the new Government; anel, on the- 
other hand, the new Government expected to find cordial 
allies in all sections of the Irish party. The api^ointment 
of Mr. Eorster to the Irish Secretaryshij) was regarded by 
many Irishmen, especially those allied to Mr. Shaw and his 
following, as a marked sign of the good intentions of the 
Government toward Ireland. 

From the earliest days of the session, however, it was 
obvious that there would be but little possibility of the 
Government and the Irish Mountain workmg together. 
The Queen^s Speech announced that the Peace Preservation 
Act would not be renewed. This was a very important 
announcement. Since the Union Ireland had hardly been 
governed by the ordinary law for a single year. Excep- 
tional coercive legislation of all kmds had succeeded,, 
accompanied, and overlapped each other with regular per- 
sistency since the beginning of the century. Now the G ov- 
ernment were going to make the bold experiment of trjing 



ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 101 

to rule Ireland without the assistance of coercive and ex- 
ceptional law. The Queen's Speech^ however, contained 
only one other reference to Ireland, in a promise that a. 
measure would be introduced for the extension of the 
Irish borough franchise. This was in itself an important 
promise. The Irish borough franchise was very much 
higher than in England; was based upon the old principle 
which still exists both in English and Irish counties. 

In England every householder in a borough has a right 
to vote, no matter what the value of the dwelling he oc- 
cupies. Any place in which he and his family live, anj 
lodging, any room separately held, gives him the right to 
record his vote. In Ireland, on the contrary, a house must, 
have a certain value, must have a certain rental, before its 
owner is allowed the privilege of voting. ,No house in an 
Irish borough under the rate of £4 a year rental carries 
with it a qualification to vote. In England and Ireland 
alike there is a standard of value which has to be reached 
before an occupier has the privilege of voting. This condi- 
tion of things the advocates of the new Eeform Bill pro- 
posed to change. But extension of the borough franchise 
did not seem to the Irish members in 1880 the most impor- 
tant form that legislation for Ireland could take just then. 
The country was greatly depressed by its recent suffering; 
the number of evictions was beginning to rise enormously.. 
The Irish members thought that the Government should 
have made some promise to consider the land question,, 
and above all should have done something to stay the 
alarming increase of evictions. Evictions had increased 
from 463 families in 1877 to 980 in 1878, to 1238 in 1879: 
and they were still on the increase, as was shown at the 
end of 1880, when it was found that 2110 famihes were 
evicted. 

An amendment to the Address was at once brought for- 
ward by the Irish party, and debated at some length. The 
Irish party called for some immediate legislation on behalf 
of the land question. Mr. Forster replied, admitting the 
necessity for some legislation, but declaring that there 
would not be time for the introduction of any such meas- 
ure that session. Then the Irish members asked for some- 
temporary measure to prevent the evictions which were 
undoubtedly rapidly on the increase, and appeals were 
made to the Government not to lend landlords military aid 



102 ENGLAND UKDER GLADSTONE. 

in carrying out evictions; but the Chief Secretary answered 
that while the law existed it was necessary to carry it out, 
, and he could only appeal to both sides to be moderate. 
-Matters slowly drifted on in this way for a short time, the 
Secret Service vote and the Irish Relief Bill affording op- 
portunities of sharj:) debates, in the course of which Mr. 
Forster more than once expressed his belief that the im- 
proved condition of Ireland would obviate the necessity for 
many of the old-fashioned methods of managing the coun- 
try. 

Evictions steadily increased, and Mr. ^Connor Power 
iDrought in a bill for the purpose of staying evictions. Then 
the Government, while refusing to accept the Irish meas- 
ure, brought in a Compensation for Disturbance Bill, which 
adopted some of the Irish suggestions. This Bill author- 
ized county court judges in Ireland, till the end of 4881, to 
allow compensation to tenants evicted for non-2oa5'ment of 
rent in cases where failure of crops had caused insolvency. 
This was explained by Mr. Forster as a mere extension of 
the Act of 1870, by making the eviction for non-payment 
of rent in cases where tenants were really unable to pay a 
disturbance within the meaning of the Act. On Friday, 
June 25, the second reading of the Bill was moved by Mr. 
Forster, who denied that it was a concession to the anti- 
rent agitation, and strongly denounced the outrages which 
were taking place in Ireland. At the same time he admit- 
ted that the rate of evictions for the year had already 
more than doubled the annual average rate jDreviously to 
1877. 

This was the point at which difference between the Irish 
party and the Government jBrst became marked. The in- 
crease of evictions in Ireland, following as it did upon the 
widespread misery caused by the failure of the harvests and 
the partial famine, had generated — as famine and hunger 
have always generated — a certain amount of lawlessness. 
Evictions were occasionally resisted with violence; here and 
there outrages were committed upon bailiffs, process-serv- 
ers, and agents. In different places, too, injuries had been 
inflicted upon the cattle and horses of land-owners and 
land-agents, cattle had been killed, horses houghed, and 
sheep mutilated. These offenses were always committed 
at night, and their jDcrpetrators were seldom discovered. 
There is no need, there should be no attemj^t, to justify 



ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 103^^ 

these crimes. But while condemning all acts of violence, 
whether upon man or beast^ it must be remembered that 
these acts were committed by ignorant peasants of the low- 
est class, maddened by hunger, want, and eviction, driven 
to despair by the suiferings of their wives and children, 
convinced of the utter hopelessness of redress, and longing 
for revenge. 

It was difficult to get these poor peasants to believe in 
the good intentioiis of the Government at any time, and 
unfortunately just then the good intentions of the Govern- 
ment were not very actively displayed. The Compensation 
for Disturbance Bill was carried in the Commons after long- 
debates in which the Irish party strove to make its princi- 
ples stronger, while the Opposition denounced it as a fla- 
grant infringement of the rights of property. It was sent 
up to the Lords, where it was rejected on Tuesday, August 
3, by a majority of 231. The Government . answered the 
appeals of Irish members by refusing to take any steps to 
make the Lords retract their decision, or to introduce any 
similar measure that session. From that point the agita- 
tion and struggles of the past four years may be said to 
date. It is impossible to estimate how much suffering 
might have been avoided if the Government had taken a 
firmer line with the House of Lords in August, 1380. The^ 
House of Lords is never a serious opponent to the will of a 
powerful and popular Ministry; and if it had once been 
shown that the Government were determined to carry some 
measure for the relief of evicted tenants, it would have soon 
ceased to make any stand against it. But though the Gov- 
ernment, through the mouth of Mr. Forster, had admitted 
the alarming increase of evictions and the agitated condi- 
tion of the country, they refused to take any further steps 
just then. They promised, indeed, to bring in some com- 
prehensive measure next session, and they appointed a 
committee to, inquire into the condition of the agricultural 
population of Ireland. On this commission they absolute- 
ly refused, in spite of the earnest entreaties of the Irish 
members, to give any place to any representative of the 
tenant-farmer^s cause. This was a curious illustration of 
the Irish policy of the Government during the early part, 
of its rule, Though the Irish members who followed Mr. 
Parnell might surely have been regarded as expressing at 
least the feelings of a very large section of the Irish people^, 



104 EN"GLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

their wishes were as little regarded as if they had represented 
nothing. It seems difficult to believe that during the 
whole of Mr. Forster^s occupation of the Irish Secretaryshij) 
he never once consulted any member of the Parnellite party 
on any part of his Irish policy; never asked their advice, 
or even their opinion, on any Irish affairs whatever. It is 
still stranger that he pursued almost the same principle 
with regard to the Irish members who sat on his own side 
of the House — moderate men like Mr. Shaw and Major 
Nolan. 

The speeches of the Land League leaders became more 
and more hostile to the Government. At a meeting in 
Kildare, in August, Mr. John Dillon made a speech in 
which he advised Boycotting, called upon the young farm- 
ers of Ireland to defend evicted Leaguers threatened with 
eviction. He looked forward to the time when there would 
be 300,000 men enrolled in the ranks of the Land League; 
and when that time came, if the landlords still refused 
justice, the word would be given for a general strike all 
over the country against rent, and then '' all the armies in 
England would not levy rent in that country. " On Tues- 
day, August 17, Sir Walter Barttelot called the attention 
of the Chief Secretary to this speech. Mr. Forster de- 
scribed it as wicked and cowardly; but, while he declined 
to prosecute Mr. Dillon for it, he announced that the Gov- 
ernment were watching the Land League speeches vei-y 
carefully. Mr. Dillon immediately came across from Ire- 
land to reply to the Chief Secretary's attack. Mr. Dillon 
was one of the most remarkable men in the National 
movement. He was the son of John Dillon, the Young 
Irelander and rebel of 1848, whom Sir Charles Gavan Duffy 
describes as ^' tall and strikingly handsome, with eyes like a 
thoughtful woman's, and the clear olive complexion and 
stately bearing of a Spanish nobleman. " When the ^^ Young 
Ireland'' rising failed, John Dillon the elder escaped to 
France, and afterward to America, and in later years he 
came back to Ireland, and was elected to Parliament for 
the county of Tipperary. Ho earned an honorable dis- 
tinction in the House of Commons, where his great aim 
was to strengthen the alliance between the Irish members 
and the English Radicals, and he won the cordial admira- 
tion of Mr. John Bright. Mr. Bright has jDaid eloquent 
tribute to the memory of John Dillon in a speech which he 



El^GLAlSTD UKDER GLADSTON^E. 105 

delivered in Dublin at a banquet wbicli Mr. Dillon had or- 
ganized to Mr. Bright. Mr. Dillon was to have presided 
at the banquet, but he died suddenly a few days before it 
took place. '^'^ I venture to say/^ said Mr. Bright, '^'^that 
his sad and sudden removal is a great loss to Ireland. I 
believe among all her worthy sons Ireland has had no 
worthier and no nobler son than John Blake Dillon. ^^ Mr. 
Dillon, the son, was a much more extreme man than his 
father. He did not display the sympathy with English 
Hadicalism which his father felt, and he appeared to have 
little or no belief in Parliamentary action. He was quite 
a young man, and had been elected for the county of Tip- 
perary at the General Election while absent himself in 
America. 

Mr. Dillon rose in the House of Commons on Monday,, 
August 23, and moved the adjournment of the House in 
order to reply to Mr. Eorster^s attack upon him. The 
manner of his speech was no less remarkable than its mat- 
ter — quiet, perfectly self-possessed. With a low, passion- 
less voice and unmoved face Mr. Dillon met the charges 
against him. He professed his absolute indifference as to 
what the Irish Secretary might choose to call him; but he. 
denied that his speech was wicked in advising- the farmers, 
of Ireland to resist an unjust law. He laid at Mr. Fors- 
ter's door the difficulties and the possible bloodshed that 
might be caused by the increasing evictions and the unjust 
course the Government was pursuing. Mr. Forster replied 
by analyzing the Kildare speech, and repeating his former 
charges. He accused Mr. Dillon of advising his hearers not 
to pay their rents, whether they could afford to or not; he 
charged him with something like sympathy with the muti- 
lation of animals, because, instead of denouncing the hough- 
ing of horses and cattle that had taken place, he had said 
that if Mayo landlords put cattle on the lands from which. 
they could get no rent, the cattle would not prosper very 
much. He quoted sentences from Mr. Dillon^s speech,, 
that ^^ those in Parliament faithful to the cause of the 
people could paralyze the hands of the Government, and 
prevent them from passing such laws as would throw men 
into prison for organizing themselves. In Parliament they 
could obstruct, and outside of it they could set the people 
free to drill and organize themselves;'^ and that *^^they 
"would show that every man in Ireland had a right to a rifle- 



106 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

if he liked to have a rifle." A long and bitter debate fol- 
lowed, in which Irish, Liberal, and Conservative members 
took part. The Irish members, in almost every case, ap- 
pealed to the Government even now to do something for the 
tenants; the Liberals replied, justifying the action of the 
Government. 

The next day, Tuesday, the 24th, another Irish debate 
arose on a motion of Mr. ParnelFs on the Parliamentary 
relations of England and Ireland. On the following 
Thursday, in Committee on Supj^ly, another Irish debate 
arose on the vote for the Irish constabulary estimates. 
This was, in many ways, a memorable debate. It 'was 
from the defense Mr. Forster made in this debate of the 
use of buckshot as ammunition for the Irish constabulary 
that the nickname of '^Buckshot" arose, which will, in all 
probability, be associated with his name as long as his 
name may be remembered. Furthermore, this debate was 
the first of several famous all-night sittings, w^hich mark 
at intervals the career of the administration. The debate 
had begun on Thursday afternoon; it was protracted all 
through Thursday night and over Friday morning, and 
only came to an end shortly before 1 P. m. on the Friday, 
when the Government consented to an adjournment of the 
debate until the following Monday. On the Monday, after 
further debate from the Irish members, the vote was finally 
carried. The Irish case against the constabulary was in 
some measure recognized by Mr. Forster, who stated that, 
although it was quite impossible then for the Executive to 
consent to the general disarmament of the constabulary 
force, yet her Majesty^s Government felt bound not to rest 
until they had placed Ireland in such a position as no 
longer to need the presence of this armed force. ' In some 
of Mr. Forster^s speeches there were menacing allusions to 
the possibility of the revival of the abandoned' coercive 
measures; but, on the other hand, Mr. Forster declined to 
promise to urge the calling of a winter session in case the 
evictions increased, in order to deal with the question. On 
September 7 the House was prorogued. 

The rejection of the Compensation for Disturbance Bill 
and the inaction of the Government gave fresh impulse to 
the agitation in Ireland. Evicting landlords, encouraged 
by the failure of the Government measure, swelled the list 
of evictions; and, on the other hands, all landlords, good 



ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. lOT 

and bad alike, became the objects of popular antipathy. 
Tlie Land League leaders, members of Parliament and 
others, advised the tenants^ passive resistance of eviction 
and non-payment of rent, in the hope that, by a sort of 
general strike on the part of the tenantry, evictions might 
be delayed until the following session saw the introductiort 
of the promised Ministerial measure. In fact, the Land 
League advised the tenants to form a sort of tenant trades- 
union, for resisting not merely evictions, but the exactions 
of what they considered an unjust amount of rent above 
Griffith's valuation. 

Griffith's valuation played such an important part in th& 
politics of this time, and was so frequently alluded to, that 
it may be well to give some idea of what it was. The 
valuation of Ireland was undertaken in 1830 on- the recom^ 
mendation of a select committee of the House of Commons 
in 1824. To insure uniform valuation an Act was passed 
in. 1836, requiring all valuations of land to be based on a 
fixed scale of agricultural produce contained in the Act. 
The valuators were instructed to act in the same manner as' 
if employed by a principal landlord dealing with a solvent 
tenant. The average valuation proved to be about twenty- 
five per cent, under the gross rental of the country. In 
1844 a select committee of the House of Commons was ap- 
pointed to reconsider the question, and an Act passed in 
1846 changed the principle of valuation from a relative 
valuation of town lands based on a fixed scale of agricult- 
ural produce to a tenement valuation for poor-law rating ta 
be made '' upon an estimate of the net annual value .... 
of the rent, for which, one year with another, the 
same might in its actual state be reasonably expected to 
let from year to year. '' The two valuations gave substan- 
tially the same results. In 1852 another Valuation Act 
was passed returning to the former principle of valuation 
by a fixed scale of agricultural produce; but Sir Eichard 
Griffith's evidence in 1869 shows the valuation employed 
was a " live-and-let-live valuation, according to the state of 
prices, for five years previous to " the time of valuation. 

Grifiith's valuation was indeed but a rough-and-ready 
way of estimating the value of land. In many cases it was 
really above the worth of the land; in other cases it was 
below it. Still it was a reasonable basis enough, certainly 
far more reasonable than the rates of the rack-rents. The 



108 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

Land League speakers condemned all rents above GrilBBth's 
valuation — only, it must be remembered, in the period of 
probation while the Government was preparing its Land 
measure — and under their direction a practical strike was 
organized against the landlords extorting high rents. It 
ought to be borne in mind that the failure of the Govern- 
ment to pass its Compensation for Disturbance Bill, coupled 
with its announcement that it practically intended to re- 
open the land question and introduce a new Land Bill, had 
driven the bad landlords in Ireland to desperation. They 
thought that the interval between the measure that had 
iailed and the measure that was to come was the only 
time left to them, and they went to work vigorously to get 
all the money they could out of the land before the crash 
came, and the Government, in the formulas of the Opposi- 
tion, '' interfered with the rights of property. " It certainly 
did seem hard that the tenants should have been left by 
the Government at the mercy of landlords who were incited 
to make the most out of their tenancies before the new Land 
Act fell upon them. But as the Government had done 
nothing, the Land League advised the people to stand out 
for themselves; to pay no rent, and passively resist eviction. 
The supporters of the Land League had another enemy 
besides the landlord in the person of the land-grabber, the 
man who took a farm from which his neighbor had been 
dispossessed. The strike was suj)ported by a form of ac- 
tion, or rather inaction, which soon became historical. 
CajDtain Boycott was an Englishman, an agent of Lord 
Earne and a farmer at Lough Mask, in the wild and beau- 
tiful district of Connemara. In his capacity as agent he 
had served notices upon Lord Earners tenants, and the 
tenantry suddenly retaliated in a most unexpected way by, 
1 in the language of schools and society, sending Captain 
: Boycott to Coventry in a very thorough manner. 

The population of the region for miles round resolved 
not to have anything to do with him, and, as far as they 
could prevent it, not to allow any one else to have anything 
to do with him. His life appeared to be in danger; he had 
to claim police protection. His servants fled from him as 
servants fled from their masters in some plague-stricken 
Italian city; the awful sentence of excommunication could 
hardly have rendered him more helplessly alone for a time. 
No one would work for him; no one would sujDply him with 



ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 109 

food. He and his wife had to work in their own fields them- 
selves in most unpleasant imitation of Theocritan shepherds 
and shepherdesses;, and play out their grim eclogue in their 
desertecl fields with the shadows of the armed constabulary 
ever at their heels. The Orangemen of the north heard of 
Captain Boycott and his sufierings, and the way in which 
he was holding his ground^ and they organized assistance 
and sent him down armed laborers from Ulster. To pre- 
vent civil war the authorities had to send a force of soldiers 
smd police to Lough Mask, and Captain Boycott^s harvests 
were brought in, and his potatoes dug by the armed Ulster 
laborers, guarded always by the little army. When the 
occupations of Ulstermen and army were over. Captain 
Boycott came to England for a time, but in the end he re- 
turned to Lough* Mask, where, curiously enough, he is once 
again at peace with his neighbors, and is even popular, 
perhaps because he showed that he was a brave man. 

The events at Lough Mask, however, gave rise to two 
things — to Boycotting on the part of the Land League, and 
to the formation of a body known as Emergency men, 
chiefly recruited from the Orange lodges. The business of 
the Emergency men was to counteract, wherever it was 
possible, the operations of the League, by helping Boy- 
cotted landlords and land-agents to gather in their harvests. 
Boycotting was freely employed by the League. It meant 
the practical excommunication of rack-renting landlords, 
evicting agents, and land-grabbers. No sympathizer with 
the League was supposed to have any dealings with the Boy- 
cotted individuals; they were not to be worked for, bought 
from, sold to. The principle of Boycotting was not ag- 
gressive; nothing was to be done to the obnoxious person, 
but, also, nothing was to be done for him. This was 
^ti'ictly legal. The law can not compel a man to buy or 
sell with one of his fellows against his will. The respon- 
sible leaders of the Land League never countenanced other 
than legal agitation. Mr. Michael Davitt again and again 
put on record in public speeches his uncompromising oppo- 
sition to all intimidation. " Our League does not desire 
to intimidate any one who disagrees with us,^^ he said; 
^^ while we abuse, coercion, we must not be guilty of coer- 
cion ;^^ and he made frequent appeals to his hearers in dif- 
ferent parts of Ireland to ^' abstain from all acts of vio«' 
lence, and to repel every incentive to outrage. " '^ Glorious, 



110 EKGLAND UKDER GLADSTONE. 

indeed/^ he said^ '^ will be our victory, and high in the es- 
timation of mankind will our grand old fatherland stand, 
if we can so curb our passions and control our actions in 
this struggle for free land, as to march to success through 
privation and danger without resorting to the wild justice 
of revenge, or being guilty of anjrthing which could sully 
the cha^-acter of a brave and Christian people. " 

Unfortunately, these good counsels were not always 
obeyed. Famine and eviction had sowed evil seed; men 
who had been evicted, men who were starving, who 
had seen their families and friends evicted, to die often 
enough of starvation on the cold roadside — these men were 
not in the temper which takes kindly to wise counseL 
Outrages have invariably followed in the track of every 
Irish famine, and they followed now this latest famine. 
There w^ere murders in different parts of the country; there 
were mutilations of cattle. These outrages were made the 
very most of by the • enemies of the Land League. Scat- 
tered agrarian murders were spoken of as if each of them 
were a link in the chain of a widely planned organization 
of massacre. People found their deepest sympathies stirred 
by the sufferings of cattle and horses in Ireland, who never 
were known to feel one throb of compunction over the 
fashionable sin of torturing pigeons at Hurlingham. But 
while most of the persons who acted thus knew little and 
cared less for the real condition of Ireland, there was one 
man who was studying the country with all the sympathy 
of one of the noblest natures now living on the earth. 
General Gordon — then known best to the world as '^ Chi- 
nese " Gordon, destined now, perhaps, to be remembered 
chiefly as " Soudan " Gordon — was in Ireland examining 
the Irish question for himself with kind, experienced eyes. 
He wrote a letter to a friend, which was published in the 
'^ Times " on December 3, 1880. " I have been lately 
over the south-west of Ireland,'^ General Gordon wrote, 
'^ in the hope of discovering how some settlement could be 
made of the Irish question, which, like the fretting cancer, 
eats away our vitals as a nation. " After speaking of the 
" complete lack of sympathy " between the landlord and 
tenant class. General Gordon went on: "No half -meas- 
ured Acts which left the landlords with any say to the ten- 
antry of these portions of Ireland will be of any use. They 
would be rendered — -as past land Acts in Ireland have been 



EKGLAKD UI^DEE GLADSTONE. Ill 

—quite abortive, for the landlords will insert clauses to do 
away with, their force. Any half -measures will only place 
the Government face to face with the people of Ireland as 
the champions of the landloifd interest. " 

General Gordon then proposed that the Government 
should, at a cost of eighty millions, convert the greater 
part of the so*uth-west of Ireland into Crown lands, in which 
landlords should have no power of control: " For the rest 
of Ireland I would pass an Act allowing free sale of leases, 
iair rents, and a Government valuation. In conclusion, I 
must say from all accounts, and my own observations, that 
the "state of our fellow-countrymen in the parts I have 
named is worse than that of any people in the World, let 
alone Europe. I believe that these people are made as we 
are, that they are patient beyond belief, loyal, but at the 
same time broken-spirited and desperate, living on the 
verge of starvation in places where we would not keep our 
cattle. , , . Our. comic prints do an infinity of harm by 
their caricatures. Firstly, the caricatures are not true, for 
the crime in Ireland is not greater than that in England; 
and, secondly, they exasperate the people ' on both sides of 
the Channel, and they do no good. It is ill to laugh and 
>scoff at a question which affects our existence. " It is im- 
possible to avoid reflecting with melancholy bitterness on 
the different aspect that the Irish question would now wear 
if a man like Chinese Gordon could have been sent to ad- 
ministrate the country in the place of the egotistical and 
ill-conditioned politician who succeeded to, and was more 
noxious than, famine. , 

Still there w®re outrages, and Ireland was disturbed. The 
Land League claimed that it did much to prevent outrage; 
that the unavoidable violence consequent upon the famine 
and the evictions would have been far greater but for them; 
that secret conspiracy and midnight outrage were notably 
diminished by their open agitation. The Government, on 
the other hand, declared that the Land League was guilty 
of ■ inciting to outrage. A State prosecution was com- 
menced against the officials of the League — Mr. Parnell, 
M.P., Mr. Dillon, M.P., Mr. T. D. Sullivan, M.P., Mr. 
Sexton, M.P., Mr. Biggar, M.P., Mr. Patrick Egan, Treas- 
urer of the Land League, Mr. Thomas Brennan, Secretary 
of the Land League, and some eight others — on the charge 
of seditious conspiracy. The jury were unable to agree. 



112 ENGLAl^D UI^DER GLADSTON^E. 

and the trial came to nothing. In the meantime the coun- 
try was becoming daily more agitated, and Mr. Forster 
daily more unj^opular. His ajDpointment had at first been 
hailed with satisfaction by many of what may be called the 
popular party, and with anger and alarm by the landlords, 
who regarded him as the herald of startling land changes. 
But Mr. Forster soon became as unpopular with the Na- 
tional party in Ireland as ever Castlereagh had been. They 
alleged that he was completely under Castle influence; that 
he only saw through the eyes and heard through the ears of 
Castle officials; that he came out j^rej^ared to be pojDular 
and settle everything at once, and that his vanity wa% 
keenly hurt by the disappointment; that, finding the forces 
he had to deal with were difficult and complex, he could 
only propose to deal with them by crushing them down. 
He was soon known to be in favor of a revival of the policy 
of coercion. Lord Cowper, the Lord Lieutenant, was an. 
amiable, but by no means a strong, man; in the Cabinet 
he feebly echoed Mr. For sterns opinions, and in the Cabinet 
Mr. Forster was able to carry the day on Irish matters when 
he proposed the revival of coercion. It w^as soon blown, 
abroad that the Government intended to bring in a Land 
Bill for Ireland, and to balance it with a Coercion Bill; 
furthermore, that they intended to bring in the Coercion 
Bill first and the Land Bill afterward. 



CHAPTER VIL 

COERCION. 

PARLiAMEifT met on Thursday, January 6, 1881. It 
found the Radicalism of the Ministry strengthened by the 
appointment of Mr. Leonard Courtney as Under-Secretary 
for the Home Department. The Queen's Speech was able 
to announce the conclusion of the Afghan war, and the in- 
tention not to occujoy Candahar, an intimation that sound- 
ed most unpleasantly in the ears of the Imperial party. The 
Boer war was spoken of; the Greek frontier was declared to 
be under the consideration of the great Powers; mention 
was made of certain measures of domestic interest, chief 
among them being the Bills for the abolition of flogging in 



ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTOKE. 115 

the army and the navy. But undoubtedly the most im- 
portant part of the royal speech referred to Ireland. The 
multiplication of agrarian crimes^, and tlie insecurity of life 
and property^ demanded the introduction of coercive meas- 
ures; while, on the other hand, the speech admitted that 
the condition of Ireland called for an extension of the Land 
Act principles of 1870. A measure for the establishment 
of county government in Ireland was also mentioned. 

The debate on the address in the House of Lords was. 
chiefly remarkable for a brilliant and bitter speech from 
Lord Beaconsfield. In the eight months that had elapsed 
since the new Ministry had come into power, much had 
happened to embarrass them and dim their triumph. 
Tjord Beaconsfield was naturally not willing to spare his 
antagonists the recapitulation of their difficulties. In the 
life-long duel between Mr. Gladstone and Lord Beaconsfield 
there came in the end to be an amount of accusation and 
recrimination of so personal a nature as to recall the worst 
traditions of the days of Bolingbroke and Walpole. Mr. 
Gladstone's Midlothian speeches had struck hard at Lord 
Beaconsfield, and Lord Beaconsfield was not now likely to 
let slip the chance of retaliation upon his antagonist. He 
dwelt with scornful emphasis upon the complete repudia- 
tion of Tory policy which had been so loudly trumpeted 
when Mr. Gladstone came into office. What had their 
principles of repudiation brought the Government? he 
asked. Eetreat from Afghanistan, abandonment of Can- 
dahar, a Berlin conference which had reopened the closed 
Eastern question and nearl}^ plunged Europe into war. 
But Lord Beaconsfield was naturally most exulting whcR 
he came to the relations of t he Government with Ireland. 
He had been mocked at for his prognostication of danger; 
the new Ministry were satisfied with the condition of Ire- 
land, and were prepared to govern it without the worn-out 
Tory methods of Peace Preservation Acts; and now, after 
little more than half a year of trial, the Government were 
coming before the House, confessing their failure, and seek- 
ing to be strengthened once again by those coercive meas- 
ures which they had so lightly rejected with every other 
portion of the policy of their predecessors.- Lori Beacons- 
field had a clever case, and he made the most of it. With 
a brilliant maliciousness which recalled the days when Mr. 
Disraeli was still a young man with the world before him^ 



114 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

Lord Beaconsfield appealed to the Lords not to do anything 
in this juncture which might weaken the Administration in 
their late effort to deal with their Irish difficulty. 

Almost at the same time that Lord Beaconsfield was at- 
tacking the policy of the Government in the Lords, Mr. 
Gladstone was defending it in the Commons. He dwelt 
upon the happy conclusion of the Montenegrin difficulty; 
he was hopeful of a fortunate settlement of the Greek diffi- 
culty ; he passed lightly over the Afghan war, touched upon 
the Boer war, and justified the Government in not making 
the Basuto war — with which they had nothing to do, and 
for which they were in no measure responsible — their own. 
But the chief point of Mr. Gladstone's speech, as indeed of 
every speech delivered then and for a long time to come, 
was of course the Irish question. The Prime Minister de- 
nied that the Ministry had any reason to feel humiliation 
at what had taken place. He justified them in not calling 
Parliament together earlier, on the ground that they were 
determined to do their best with the existing law before ap- 
pealing for stronger measures. In a few remarkable sen- 
tences he censured the late Government for the manner in 
which they had chosen to act upon the existing law: they 
put the law into effect against four men, three of whom 
were utterly insignificant: '' One of them, indeed,' ' Mr. 
Gladstone added, thinking of Mr. Davitt, *' has since 
proved himself to be a man of great ability, but was not 
then of much note.'' " The late Government did not aim 
their weapons at the cliief offenders, but contented them- 
selves with charging comj^aratively insignificant men, and, 
having charged them, did not bring them to trial." " The 
method of threatening without striking is, in our opinion," 
said Mr. Gladstone, amid the loud cheers of his party, 
*' the worst course of action that could have been adopted;" 
and he pointed to the State trials then going on as a j^roof 
of the more decided action and stronger purposes of the 
new Ministry. He considered that they had done their 
duty in watching the country for a while under the opera- 
tion of the ordinary law. He thought they had now waited 
long enough, but could not admit that they had waited too 
long, though •he*declined to allow that the coercion which 
he thought necessary was any remedy for the grievances of 
Ireland. Hence the announcement with regard to the new 
Land Act. He claimed that the Land Act of 1870 had not 



EKGLAND UNDEE GLADSTONE. 115 

been a failure; but lie confessed that the provisions of the 
Act '* have not prevented undue and frequent augmenta^ 
tions of rent which have not been justified by the real value 
of the holding, but have been brought in in consequence of 
the superior strength of the landlord/^ 

Mr. Forster had given notice^ before Mr. Gladstone spoke^ 
of the introduction of bills for the better protection of per- 
sons and property in Ireland, and to amend the law relat- 
ing to a carrying and possession of arms; and Mr. Glad- 
stone had announced his intention of moving that these 
bills should have priority over all other business. But 
tkese bills were not destined to be introduced for some days 
to come. The address was still to be disposed of, and there 
were many amendments to it to be considered and dis- 
cussed, several of these being moved by Irish members and 
relating to Irish affairs. But as, according to Thackeray, 
even the Eastern Counties^ trains come in at last_, so, too^, 
the debate on the address came to an end at last. On 
Thursday, January 20, after eleven days of debate, the re- 
port of the address was agreed to amid general cheering^ 
But already the Irish members had roused the anger of the 
Government. Most of the speeches on the address had 
been Irish speeches, the speeches of Irish members on the 
various Irish questions. Before the debate had concluded,^ 
Lord Hartington had attacked the obstructive policy of the 
Irish members, and warned them that their action might 
compel the House to come to some understanding by which 
the process of business should be facilitated. If every day 
added to the debate on the address staved off the introduc- 
tion of coercion, so too. Lord Hartington urged, it delayed 
the introduction of the promised Land Act. Lord Ed- 
mond Fitzmaurice and Mr. Thorold Rogers formed them- 
selves into a sort of amateur committee on obstruction. 
They plunged into records of old rulings, they became 
learned in antique principles of procedure and venerable 
points of order, and they addressed to the ^' Times, ^' three 
days before the debate on the address concluded, a long 
letter in which they pointed out the existence of certain 
seventeenth-century orders of the House. One of these 
ruled that '^ if any man speak impertinently, or beside the 
question in hand, it standeth with the order of the House 
for Mr. Speaker to interrupt him, and to know the pleasure 
of the House whether they will further hear him:^^ an 



116 EliTGLAND UKDER GLADSTON^E. 

order which was sanctioned and strengthened by lat«r rul- 
ings. 

On Monday, January 24, 1881, Mr. Forster introduced 
his first coercion measure. Mr. Forster made out a long 
and elaborate case in justification of the measure. He pre- 
sented a return of outrages to the House of Commons 
which looked alarming at first, but which Mr. Labouchere 
showed to be somewhat curiously manufactured. In many 
cases outrages were of the simplest description; in many 
more the number was swelled by an mgenious process of 
subdivision, so that one outrage was made to stand for sev- 
eral, by the simj^le process of multiplying any given offense 
by the number of men committing it. The total number 
of agrarian outrages in Ireland in the year 1880 was 2590. 
I^eturns of agrarian crimes in Ireland had been made since 
1844, but not before, and the highest return since that date 
was for the year 1845, the first year of the great famine, in 
which year the list of outrages numbered 1920, or thirty- 
five per cent, less than in 1880. Excluding threatening 
letters, the number of outrages in 1880 was 1253, as con- 
trasted with 950 in 1845, or thirty-two per cent, higher. 
Moreover, as the population of Ireland was only 5,000,000 
in 1880, to 8,000,000 in 1845, the proportion of outrages 
in 1880 was really more than double the proportion of out- 
rages in 1845. There were, indeed, few cases of murder, 
or attempts at murder; the outrages were chiefly intimida- 
tion by personal violence, by injury to property and cattle, 
and by threatening letters. The number of outrages of 
this kind had greatly increased during the last three months 
of 1880, and the area of intimidation was extending. One 
hundred and fifty-three persons were under the personal 
protection of two policemen on the first day of the new 
year, and 1149 persons were watched over by the police. 
Mr. Forster urged that the existing law was not strong 
enough to grapple with this system of intimidation. The 
instruments of this intimidation were, however, well known 
to the police; they were generally old Fenians and Ribbon- 
men, the mauvais sujets of their neighborhood, dissolute 
ruffians, and village tyrants. The new Bill would give the 
Lord Lieutenant power by warrant to arrest any person 
reasonably suspected of treason, treasonable felony, or trea- 
sonable practices, and the commission, whether before or 
after the Act, of crimes of intimidation or incitement 



ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 117 

thereto. By this means the Government would be able to 
lay their hands upon the mauvais sujets, the village ty- 
rants, and, by depriving the Land League of its police, ren- 
der it powerless. Naturally an animated debate followed. 
The Irish Nationalists, of course, opposed the measure. 
Moderate Irishmen, like Dr. Lyons, Mr. Givan, Mr. Rich- 
ardson, and Mr. Litton, either opposed the precedence of 
coercion to remedial measures, or urged the introduction of 
a Bill to stay unfair eviction pending the introduction of 
the remedial legislation. Mr. Bradlaugh did not consider 
that a case had been made out for a Coercion Bill. The 
Conservative party, of course, supported the Government. 
The debate was adjourned on the Monday night, and its 
resumption was interrupted for a couple of days by the first 
all-night sitting of the year. On the day after Mr. Fors- 
ter^s introduction of the Coercion Bill, Mr. Gladstone 
moved to declare urgency for the Coercive Bills, and so 
give them precedence over all other public business. The 
Irish Nationalists at once set themselves to opposing this 
by every means in their power. The new standing order 
prevented the taking of many divisions, as it allowed indi- 
vidual members only two motions for adjournment; so the 
Irish members confined themselves to making speeches, 
which were incessantly interrupted by calls to order from 
the chair. Mr. Biggar, at a comparatively early period of 
the debate, got into a confiict with authority which led to 
his being suspended from the sitting; whereupon he imme- 
diately withdrew, and, ascending the heights of the 
strangers^ gallery, watched the confiict with unwearying 
interest from that elevation, as Ivanhoe followed from his 
turret the fortunes of the Black Knight and his fellows. 
The struggle, indeed, was sufficiently interesting to be 
worth sitting out. It was fought — this being but a first 
essay for the year — ^with sufficient good-humor on both 
sides. The hours waned; but there came no waning in the 
animation of the speakers on both sides. Members came 
and went; ingenious little plans of relays for relieving 
guard were arranged. Morning came, and brought with 
it a fog scarcely less obscure than night. It was not 
bright enough till eleven o'clock to extinguish the gas. 
Very dismal the chamber showed when daylight did come, 
as unwashed, unbrushed, with weary, sleepy faces and 
tumbled clothes, the members faced each other. For three 



118 EKGLAlfD UNDER GLADSTONE. 

hours more the fight went on, and then, at two o^clock, 
Mr. Gladstone's motion was agreed to, and the House, not 
unnaturally, immediately adjourned to wash, eat, and 
sleep. y 

This was but the prelude to a series of stormy scenes in 
the House, each one surpassing its predecessors in bitterness 
and unpleasantness. The debate on the Coercion Bill was 
resumed on the Thursday, and was remarkable for a speech 
from Mr. Bright. Mr. Bright had kept silence — with the 
exception of a protest against obstruction — since the begin- 
ning of the session, and it had been whispered that he was 
so silent because he was .not in accord with his colleagues 
on the Irish question. He was roused from his silence by 
a speech of The CDonoghue's. The O'Donoghue was at 
this period of his varied political career an ardent sup- 
porter of Mr. Parnell. He sat in opposition to Govern^ 
ment, and made himself cons2Dicuous as an aggressive patriot 
and unfailing opjDonent of the Government. He declared 
that the Land League differed in no respect from the Anti- 
Corn Law League, and taunted Mr. Bright by asking what 
trials followed the agitation and the denunciations of land- 
lords which belonged to the movement of which Mr. bright 
and Mr. Cobden were the heads. A little later in the de- 
bate Mr. Bright rose and spoke. In a speech of great bit- 
terness Mr. Bright attacked the conduct of the Irish Parlia- 
mentar}^ party. He denied angrily that any parallel existed 
between the action of the Land League and the Anti-Corn 
Law League. With all the indignation of which Mr. 
Bright is a master, and with more than his usual vehe- 
mence, he flung himself in a very fury of passionate oratory 
"iipon the Irish opponents of the Government. It almost 
seemed as if Mr. Bright were determined to make it plain, 
by the very rage and whirlwind of his j)assion, how com- 
pletely unfounded were those rumors which hinted that he 
was at odds with his colleagues in the Cabinet on the Irish 
question. He assailed his opponents with all the eloquence 
at his command ; and though the speaker was now old, the 
strength and power of that eloquence were still sufficiently 
impressive, even to those at whom all its fierce invective 
was leveled. 

The severance of the extreme Irish 25arty and the Govern- 
ment was now complete. Mr. Bright, who had often sup- 
ported Ireland before, and was looked upon as a true friend 



ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 119 

by the Irish people^ was now one of the bitterest opponents 
of the whole national movement and of its Parliamentary 
leaders. The Irish national press was fiercely exasperated 
to find Mr. Bright supporting coercion for Ireland. He 
had indeed voted for coercion before in his younger days^ 
but he had always been eloquent against it, and his utter- 
ances were brought up against him by the Irish papers. 
They reminded him that in 1866 he had described coercion 
ior Ireland as an '' ever-failing and ever-poisonous 
remedy;^^ and they asked him why he recommended the 
imsuccessful and venomous legislation now. They pointed 
to his speech of 1849, in which he said,^' The treatment of 
this Irish malady remain^ ever the same. We have noth- 
ing for it still but force and alms.^"* They quoted from his 
speech of 1847: '' I am thoroughly convinced that every- 
thing the Government or Parliament can do for Ireland 
will be unavailing unless the foundation of the work be 
laid deep and well, by clearing away the fetters under which 
land is now held, so that it may become the possession of 
real owners, and be made instrumental to the employment 
and sustentation of the people. Honorable gentlemen op- 
posite may fancy themselves interested in maintaining the 
present system; but there is surely no interest they can 
have in it which will weigh against the safety and pros • 
perity of Ireland.^'' Such a passage as this might have 
served, it was urged, as a motto for the Land League itself. 
What other doctrine did the Land League uphold but that 
the land should become the possession of real owners, and 
be made instrumental to the employment and sustentation 
of the people? Might -not the Land League have fairly 
.asked the Government what interest it could have in the 
present system of land which would weigh against the 
safety and prosperity of Ireland? Had not Mr. Bright told 
them, too, in 1866, that '^ the great evil of Ireland is this: 
that the Irish people — the Irish nation— are dispossessed of 
the soil, and what we ought to do is to provide for and aid 
in their restoration to it by all measures of Justice''^? He 
disliked the action of the Irish members now because they 
were acting against the Liberal party; but had he not said, 
in 1866 also, *^ If Irishmen were united, if you hundred 
and five members were for the most part agreed, you might 
do almost anything that you liked ;^^ and further said, " If 
there were a hundred more members, the representatives 



120 ENGLAND UNDEK GLADSTONE. 

of large and free constituencies, tlien your cry would be 
heard, and the people would give you that justice which a 
class has so long denied 3'ou ^^? '^ Exactly/' replied his- 
Trish critics. ** We have now a united body of Irishmen^ 
the largest and most united the House has ever seen, and 
you do not seem to look kindly upon it. You do not seem 
to be acting up to your promise made in Dublin in 1866.' '^ 
*' If I have in past times felt an unquenchable sympathy 
with the sufferings of your people, you may rely upon it 
that, if there be an Irish member to speak for Ireland, he 
will find me heartily by his side.'' At the same speech in 
Dublin, Mr. Bright said, '^ if I could be in all other things 
the same, but in birth an Irishman, there is not a town itl 
this island I would not visit for the purpose of discussing 
the great Irish question, and of rousing my countrymen to 
some great and united action." " This is exactly what we 
are doing," said his Land League critics; '' why do youL 
denounce us now? Why do you vote for Coercion Acts to 
prevent the discussion of the great Irish question?" 

The next day, Friday, January 28, while the impression, 
of Mr. Bright 's speech was still fresh in the minds of the 
House, Mr. Gladstone made a sj^eech which, viewed as a 
piece of Parliamentary attack, certainly far surpassed it. 
With all his eloquence Mr. Gladstone flung himself against, 
his enemies, justified the introduction of coercion in the 
disorganized condition of Ireland, and bitterly denounced 
many of the speeches of Mr. Parnell and Mr. Biggar. 
From a dramatic point of view the scene in the chamber 
was singularly impressive. If the sheer force of eloquence 
and anger and the support of a powerful and enthusiastic 
majority could have done it, the opposition would have 
come to an end then and there, and the Coercion Bill been 
carried at once. Never since the night when Sir Charles 
Dilke made his famous speech, and Mr. Auberon Herbert 
announced himself too as a republican, had the House wit- 
nessed such a scene, though since then stormy scenes have 
been less infrequent. Mr. Gladstone was playing the part 
of Juj^iter suppressing the revolted gods. Wine, says 
Macaulay, was the spell which unlocked the fine intellect 
of Addison. Passion is the spell which most sureiy un- 
locks Mr. Gladstone's skill as an orator of attack. The 
fury of his indignation swept over the House and stirred it 
to its depths, arousing tumultuous enthusiasm in the ma- 



EKGLAN"D UNDEK GLADSTONE. 121 

Jority of nis hearers, ajid angry protest from the minority 
lie was assailing. The pale, unmoved face of Mr. Parnell 
occasionally showed through the storm as he rose to correct 
the Prime Minister in his quotations from his speeches, 
and was howled and shouted, if not into silence, at least 
into being inaudible. 

Yague rumors floated about the House of Commons on 
the Monday evening that there would be troublesome work 
-ere night, but at first there seemed no promise of the ex- 
tsited and strenuous fighting which kept the weary Com- 
mons awake through successive days. The Irish members 
were determined to resist the Coercion Bill in every stage 
to the utmost. They challenged fate, in the shape of the 
Ministry, to come into the lists and fight it out, and the 
result was the longest sitting then on record. The hours 
€ame and went, the gray dawn stole on the heels of night, 
and ugly night again came breathing at the heels of day, 
and found the Commons still wrangling, still dividing, still 
calling to order, still stupidly sleeping or vainly trying to 
follow the arguments of the various speakers. The scene 
was full of interest to those — and there were some — who 
had the courage to see it out from the watch-towers of the 
Speaker^ s gallery. As the time went on, the appearance 
of the House was not without elements of humor. One 
member of the Third Party, as the Irish party were called, 
found the atmosphere cold, and insisted upon addressing 
the House -in a long ulster, resembling the gaberdine of 
USToah in the toy-shop arks. On the Treasury Bench Lord 
Hartington, grimly erect, doggedly surveyed the obstruc- 
tives. He was curiously in contrast with Mr. Forster, who 
sat doubled, or, rather, crumpled up, in an attitude of ex- 
treme depression. The occupants of the front Opposition 
bench wore an air of bland unconcern. " This is not our 
fault,^^ they seemed to say, ^' but it is not uninteresting, 
;and we do not mind seeing you through with it. ' ' 

At ten minutes to five o'clock on the Tuesday morning 
the Speaker left the chair; the clerk at the table gravely in- 
formed the House of the unavoidable absence of Mr. 
Speaker, and his place was taken by Mr. Lyon Playfair, 
Still the debate went on. Irish member succeeded Irish 
member in lengthy speeches, interrupted by incessant calls 
to order from all parts of the House and from the chair. 
Somewhere about six o ''clock the motion for the adjourn- 



122 E2TGLAKD UNDER GLADSTONE. 

ment of tlie debate was defeated by 141 to 211'. majority 
114. The debate was then resumed on the origmal motion^ 
and Mr. Healy immediately moved the adjournment of 
the House. At twenty-five minutes past one on Tuesday 
afternoon the deputy-chairman left the chair, which was 
reoccupied by the Speaker. A small side discussion sprung 
up at this point, Mr. Parnell contending that, by the 
standing orders of the House, the Speaker had not the 
right to return to his place after that place had been taken 
by the deputy-chairman until the next sitting of the 
House, a point which the Speaker ruled was based on a 
misconception of the order. At ten minutes to three the 
motion for the adjournment of the House was divided 
upon, and was lost by a majority of 204; the numbers 
being, ayes 21, nays 225. Still the debate went on, with- 
out any sign of flagging determination on either side. The 
adjournment of the debate was then moved by Mr. Daly, 
and this question was fought out for some time and divided 
upon — 23 to 163; majority against, 140. The debate was 
then resumed on Dr. Lyon's amendment to the main ques- 
tion, and the adjournment of the House moved. At half- 
past eleven on the Tuesday night the Speaker again left 
the chair, and his 23lace was again taken by Mr. Lyon 
Pla}^air. At midnight Sir Stafford Korthcote apj^ealed 
alike to the chair and the Government to do something to 
jDut an end to the obstruction. A little later on the debate 
was enlivened by a wordy wrangle between Mr. (now Sir 
Frederick) Milbank and Mr. Biggar. Mr. Milbank com- 
plained that Mr. Biggar had used offensive language to 
him in the chamber, and, in consequence, Mr. Milbank,. 
later on, in the lobby, addressed opprobrious terms to Mr. 
Biggar. Mr. Biggar denied having used the words attrib- 
uted to him, whereupon Mr. Milbank apologized to the 
House. Bj this time a fresh division had been taken, and 
the motion for adjournment negatived by 22 to 197; 
majority, 175. At ten minutes to five on Wednesday 
morning the second unsuccessful attempt to count the 
House was made. At nine o'clock the Speaker resumed 
the chair, and, immediately rising, made perhaps one of 
the most remarkable speeches ever delivered from the 
chair. The SpeaKer observed that the motion to bring in 
the Bill had been under discussion for five days, and that 
during that time most of the opposition was purely ob~ 



EIT GLAND UKDEK GLADSTON'E. 123 

structive. By the existing rule nothing could be done to 
stop this obstruction; but the Speaker was prepared to take 
upon himself the responsibility of ending it by declining to 
call upon any more members, and by putting the questions 
at once from the chair. This announcement was received 
with tumultuous cheering, and the Speaker then put the 
motion for Dr. Lyon^s amendment, which was defeated by 
a division by 164 to 19; majority, 145. The Speaker then 
proceeded to put the main question. An Irish member 
rose, but the Speaker refused to hear him. Then the 
whole Irish party stood up, shouted for some seconds the 
€ry of *' Privilege ^^ — which had. not been heard in the 
House since the day when Charles I. came looking for his 
five members — and, bowing to the chair, left the chamber 
in a body. The Bill was immediately brought in by Mr. 
Porster. Mr. Forster then explained to the House that on 
the previous Friday he had given into the hands of Mr. 
Gladstone a speech which he believed to be by Mr. Parnell, 
and which Mr. Gladstone quoted from as being by Mr. 
Parnell, but which was, as a matter of fact, delivered by 
another person. The House then adjourned until twelve 
o'clock of the same day, when it met again to discuss the 
second reading of the Coercion Bill. The Irish members 
"who had left the House in a body that morning did not, 
however, intend to follow the example set them by Pulteney 
and his followers, in the early part of the last century, and 
secede from the House for any length of time. When the 
House met again at midday, they returned to their places 
in order to criticise the action of the Speaker in bringing 
the debate to a close on his own motion. The Speaker, 
however,, ruled that the matter was not a question of privi- 
lege, and could not be discussed then, but must be brought 
forward on a specific motion. The adjournment of the 
House was then moved by Mr. A. M. Sullivan, and sup- 
ported by Mr. Joseph Cowen, Mr. Labouchere, Lord Ean- 
dolph Churchill, and Mr. Shaw, and argued upon until 
nearly six o'clock, when it was defeated on division by 278 
to 44; majority, 234; after which, it being six o'clock, and 
the day being Wednesday, the House of necessity adjourned. 
The next day, however, witnessed a still more exciting 
scene, compared with which any mere prolongation of de- 
bate seemed tame and colorless. At question time Mr. 
Parnell suddenly rose and asked if it was true that Mr. 



324 ENGLAITD UNDER GLADSTON'E. 

Michael Davitt had. been arrested that day at one o'clock. 
There was a murmur of surprise^ followed immediately by 
a deep silence as Sir William Harcourt rose to reply. 
** Yes, sir/' was the answer of the Home Secretary, amid 
the wildest cheering from both sides of the House. Had 
some new conquest or some great victory been announced,, 
it could not have been greeted with greater rapture. Hu- 
man nature and human voices have their limits, and cer- 
tainly the limits of human voices were severely taxed that 
day when it was definitely announced that Michael Davitt 
was once again in i^rison. When the cheering abated, Sir- 
William Harcourt went on to state that the Irish secretary 
and he, after consultation with their colleagues and the law 
officers of the Crown, had come to the conclusion that Mr. 
Davitt' s conduct was incompatible with the conditions of 
his ticket of leave. Mr. Parnell tried to find out what 
condition of ticket of leave Mr. Davitt had broken, but th& 
Speaker called upon Mr. Gladstone, who was waiting ta 
submit to the House his Urgency motion. Mr. Gladstone 
had risen and begun to speak when Mr. Dillon rose also to 
a point of order. What the jDoint of order was the House 
was not fated to hear; for amid much noise and shouting 
from all parts of the House, the Speaker rose and declared 
Mr. Gladstone in possession of the House. Mr. Dillon 
instead of sitting down when the Speaker rose, and then 
rising again to make his point of order clear, remained 
standing with folded arms facing the speaking Speaker, 
and demanding his privilege of speech. A few seconds of 
excited confusion followed, few members of the House re- 
maining silent. The majority shouted against Mr, 
Dillon. The Irish minority shouted scarcely less loudly 
for him. " Name him," vociferated English members; 
to which the Irish members responded hj shouting, *"' Point 
of order. " Then the Speaker gravely named Mr. Dillon 
for disregarding the authority of the chair, not, as he after- 
ward explained, for rising to a point of order while Mr. 
Gla^lstone was speaking, but for remaining on his feet after 
the Speaker had risen. Mr. Dillon now sat down, and Mr. 
Gladstone, rising, immediately moved the usual formula, 
familiar enough even then, but destined within the next 
half hour to become much more familiar, that the offend- 
ing member should be suspended from the service of the 
House for the remainder of the sitting. A division was 



EN-GLAKD UNDER GLADSTONE. 125 

taken^ and Mr. Gladstone's motion carried by 395 to 33; 
majority, 362. The Speaker then called upon Mr. Dillon 
to withdraw. Mr. Dillon rose again and strove to speak^ 
but the shouts with which he was greeted rendered him 
practically inaudible. He was understood to announce 
that he refused to withdraw. The Speaker immediately 
called upon the sergeant-at-arms to remove Mr. Dillon. 
At first Mr. Dillon refused to move, but at a signal from 
the sergeant several attendants advanced into the House, 
whereupon, as if accepting this as symbolic of sufficient 
force to remove him by physical strength, Mr. Dillon got 
up and left the House. All that happened immediately 
after was an incoherent medley. Mr. A. M. Sullivan spoke 
amid vehement clamor against the Speaker, who explained 
that he had named Mr. Dillon, not for interrupting Mr* 
Gladstone on a call to order, but for remaining on his feet 
when the Speaker rose. Mr. Gladstone now made a fur- 
ther effort to go on with his speech, and was at once inter- 
rupted by The O'Donoghue, who loudly moved the 
adjournment of the House. The Speaker taking no notice 
of this, Mr. Parnell jumped up and called out that he 
moved that Mr. Gladstone should be no longer heard. 
Amid stentorian cheers from his own party and indignant 
shouts from the rest of the House, Mr. Parnell reiterated 
his motion in defiance of the warning of the Si3eaker, and 
was immediately named. Mr. Gladstone again made the 
motion for expulsion, which was carried by a majority of 
405 to 7, the Irish members refusing to leave their seat^ 
and vote. On the reassembling of the House, Mr. Parnell 
refused to withdraw until the sergeant-at-arms had gone 
through the same ceremony with him as with Mr. Dillon,, 
when he retired amid the plaudits of his party. It must 
here be remarked that, whatever may be the opinion as to 
the wisdom, policy, or propriety of Mr. Pamelas conduct 
on this occasion, there was absolutely nothing " disorderly '^ 
in the Parliamentary sense about it. But a little time be- 
fore,' Mr. Gladstone had moved, and moved successfully^ 
that a member should be no longer heard, and it had been 
urged in defense of that motion that it was perfectly per- 
missible, although it had not been made in Parliament for 
something like a couple of centuries. Now, if it was per- 
missible for Mr. Gladstone to put this venerable rule into 
action against an Irish member, it was equally permissible 



126 EKGLAND UXDER GLADSTON"E. 

for an Irish member to put it into practice against Mr. 
Gladstone. We are not speaking now of the good or bad 
taste of such a line of action^, nor do we need to be remind- 
ed of the impossibility of carrying on the business of any 
legislative assembly if any member might interrupt it by 
motions that other members be not heard. But the Prime 
Minister had himself revived this antiquated form; he had 
drawn it out from the dust of centuries in order to silence 
an unwelcome speaker; it had received the full sanction of 
Parliament, and until Parliament repealed or altered it, it 
was in full force. As the rules binding the House of Com- 
mons affect all members equally — as no member, whether 
he be at the head of the Government or not, has any privi- 
lege whatever of making any motion which is denied to any 
other niember — it is clear that Mr. Parnell was as much in 
his Parliamentary right as Mr. Gladstone in moving that a - 
member should not be heard. So much for the mere 
question of the motion, the revival of which Mr. Gladstone 
was himself probably the first to regret. 

After the division had been taken, and the leader of the Irish - 
party removed. Lord Eichard Grosvenor, the Liberal Whi23, 
announced that the Irish members had refused to leave 
their seats and enter the division lobby, a line of action 
which Mr. Gladstone immediately exj^ressed a ho2je that _ 
the Speaker would find some means of dealing with. He 
was, however, once more iaterrupted, this time by Mr. 
Finigan, member for Ennis, who, following the example 
of Mr. Parnell, again proposed that Mr. Gladstone should 
be no longer heard. The Speaker named Mr. Finigan; 
Mr. Gladstone, for the third time, made the suspension 
motion, and a division was again taken, and the motion 
<iarried by 405 to 2, the Irish members again expressing 
their protest against the whole proceeding by remaining in 
their seats and refusing to vote. The SjDeaker cautioned 
them that he would regard this abstention as defiance of 
the authority of the chair, and the Clerk of the House took 
down their names. When Mr. Finigan had been removed -> 
from the House, after the same fashion as Mr. Dillon and 
Mr. Parnell, the Speaker called the attention of the House 
to the conduct of the Irish members, and '' named " them 
at once. There were twenty-eight of them in all. Mr. 
Gladstone immediately rose and moved for their suspension 
in a body, and the motion was carried by 410 to 6, the ab- 



EKGLAKD UKDER GLADSTONE. 127 

staining members, as before, refusing to vote. Then came 
a strange scene, such as had never been witnessed in the 
House of Commons before. The name of each mem.ber 
was read out in turn by the Speaker, as he called upon him 
to withdraw. Each member called upon answered to his 
name with a short speech condemning the action of the 
Government, and refusing to go unless removed by superior 
force. To each member making such announcement, the 
sergeant-at-arms advanced and touched him solemnly on 
the shoulder. In most cases the member so touched at 
once rose and walked out; one or two exceptionally stal- 
wart members, however, refused to go until the sergeant- 
at-arms approached them with such a muster of attendants 
as made it evident that he commanded sufficient force to 
compel withdrawal. For half an hour this process of nam- 
ing, speech-making, and removal went on. At length the 
bulk of the Irish members were expelled, and had rallied 
in the conference room, where they drew up an address to 
the people of Ireland, urging them to remain quiet in sj^ite 
of the indignity offered to their representatives. Then, for 
the fourth time, Mr. Gladstone rose and essayed to go on 
with his motion. But, in the meantime, some few Irish 
members who had not been present hitherto in the House 
had arrived^ and through their opposition shared their 
comrades^ fate. First Mr. 0' Kelly, and then Mr. O'Don- 
nell, moved that Mr. Gladstone be no longer heard, and 
were named, suspended, and removed, while three others 
— Mr. Molloy, Mr. Ei chard Power, and Mr. O'Shaughness^ 
— went through the same process for refusing to take part 
in the division, and remaining in their seats while the 
division went on. Then, none of the Irish members who 
followed the lead of Mr. Parnell being left in the House, 
Mr. Gladstone began his Urgency motion for the sixth, 
time, and proceeded with it without further interrruption. 
After the coup d'etat by which the Speaker brought the 
debate on the introduction of the Coercion Bill to an end^ 
the Government felt the necessity of altering the rules of 
the House so far as to meet with such emergencies in the 
future in a more legal manner. A set of rules was accord- 
ingly drawn up, nominally by the Speaker, for the regula- 
tion of the business of the House when the state of public 
business should be declared urgent. These rules limited 
the occasions and the scope of motions for adjournment of 



-7^ 



128 EKGLAKD UNDEK GLADSTONE. 

either tlie House or the debate, gave the Speaker power of 
calhng tlie attention of the House to continued tediousness 
and irrelevancy^ on the part of a member, and of taking 
the general sense of the House on any debate, and, if sup- 
ported by a three fourths majority, of putting the question 
without furthar debate. The rules further prevented the 
possibility of debate on the motion for the House to go into 
committee on any matter declared urgent, and limited 
members to a single speech. These rules were laid on the 
table of the House by the Speaker on Wednesday, February 
S, 1881. The long-argued-about principle of cloture — or 
closure, to give what has become an English institution its 
English name — was of course conceded in the rule which 
allowed the Speaker, when presiding over a debate governed 
by the urgency rules, to appeal to the general sense of the 
House, and, if supported by a three fourths majority, to 
put the question at once from the chair without any fur- 
ther debate. 

The debate on the Coercion Bill was not concluded very 
rapidly. On Wednesday, February 23, 1881, the bill was 
still in committee, and Mr. Gladstone, in order to acceler- 
ate its progress, moved that on the next day at seven the 
debate should come to an end, and the third reading be 
moved without discussion on any amendments that might 
be left unconsidered at that time. There was no debate 
2)ermissible upon this motion, which was moved by Lord 
Hartington in the absence of Mr. Gladstone, who was con- 
fined to his room for a few days by an accident — he had 
slipped on the ice near his house, and hurt his head — and 
was carried by 371 to 53; majority, 318. At seven 
o'clock, accordingly, the debate was cut short by the 
Speaker; the remaining amendments were divided upon 
without debate, and the third reading moved for by Mr. 
Forster. The third reading was carried in the Commons 
the next day, Friday, February 25, by 281 to 36; majority, 
245. The bill was then sent up to the House of Lords, 
where it passed rapidly through all its stages; was read a 
third time on Wednesday, March 2, and received the royal 
assent by commission on the same day. 

The Arms Bill was introduced in the Commons on Tues- 
day, March 1, by Sir William- Harcourt, in the absence of 
Mr. Forster; and its third reading was carried on Friday, 
March 11, by 236 to 2Q — majority 210 — and was passed in 



EKGLAND UlTDER GLADSTON"^. 129 

the Lords on the following Friday. During its passage 
through the Commons there were some heated debates on 
the relationship of the American Fenians with the Irish 
Land Leaguers, in one of which, on Thursday, March 3, 
Mr. Healy suiered suspension for charging the Home 
Secretary with breaches of truth and usual disiiigenuous- 
ness. Mr. O^Donnell was suspended on Tuesday, March 
8, after a dispute with Mr. Playfair on a point of order. 

In the meantime the excitement in Ireland was increas- 
ing. While the coercion debates were going on, Mr. Par- 
nell had gone across to Paris, accompanied by Mr. 0' Kelly, 
and obtained an interview with M. Victor Hugo, who was 
expected to issue some manifesto in Ireland. M. Victor 
Hugo compared Ireland to Poland struggling against 
Eussia, but he wrote nothing on the subject, either in prose 
or verse. The interview, however, provoked a remon- 
strance from the great Catholic organ, the " Univers,^^ 
which warned Mr. Parnell that it was not well for the 
leaders of a Catholic cause and country to seek for the 
alliance of men like Victor Hugo and his friends. Mr. 
Parnell had an interview with M. Eochefort on the one 
hand, and with the Archbishop of Paris on the other. 
"Just at that moment, when people were saying that there 
would be a split between the Nationalists and the Catholic 
clergy on account of the friendship of M. Eochefort, an 
event occurred which served to show how much the Irish 
priests and tb^ Irish people were in agreeitient as to the 
Land League and the national cause generally. In Ireland 
a Ladies^ Land League had been formed, with Miss Anna 
Parnell — a sister of Mr. Parnell— for its president. Its 
object was to assist the existing Land League in every pos- 
sible way — by raising funds, by inquiring into the cases of 
eviction, arid by affording relief to evicted tenants. As 
soon as this new organization came into existence it was 
assailed by Archbishop M^Cabe of Dublin. In an angry 
pastoral he denounced the participation of women in the 
strife of politics as at once immodest and wicked. Mr. A. 
M. Sullivan, one of the most Catholic of Irish Catholic 
members of Parliament, immediately wrote a reply defend- 
ing the Ladies^ Land League, and justifying and approv- 
ing of the manner in which the women of Ireland proposed 
to come to the assistance of their husbands, fathers, and 
brothers. Mr. A. M. Sullivan's letter had not long been 

5 



130 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

written when the Ladies' Land League found a still 
stronger ally, and Archbishop MTabe a still more formi- 
dable opponent, in Archbishop Croke, of Cashel. From 
the rock which has reminded so many travelers of the 
Athenian Acropolis, Archbishop Croke launched an epistle 
which Jerome might have envied for its vigorous direct- 
ness. The Archbishop of Cashel had nothing but praise 
for the Ladies' Land League, and for their eloquent cham- 
pion. In a moment ArchbishojJ Croke was the hero of the 
National party in Ireland. They greeted him with joy as 
a proof that the Church was on their side; and when he 
went, shortly after, on a sort of tour of inspection through 
a great part of Ireland, he was received everywhere with a 
display of the most enthusiastic homage and devotion. 
Long before Archbishop Croke had come so prominently 
to the front, many of the pi-iests had shown their sympathy 
with, and apjDroval of, the Land League doctrines; but 
after the action of the Archbishop of Cashel, their sym- 
pathy and approval became more openly and more marked- 
ly displayed. Day by day the ranks of the League were 
SAvelled by Irish ecclesiastics of all orders. It might be 
fairly said that, roughly speaking, all the younger priests 
throughout the country were in cordial sympathy with the 
Land League, and a very large number of the elder'priests 
as well. It was this sympathy between the priests and the 
peojDle which gave the Land League a great part of its 
strength; it t^s the eagerness of the people tp be in accord 
with their priests which made them receive Archbishop 
Croke's pronouncement with so much delight, and listen 
to his counsels with as much readiness as if they had come 
from the lips of ParneU or Davitt. 

When the Coercion Acts were carried, Mr. John Dillon 
went over to Ireland and began a series of speeches in 
different parts of the country, supporting the League and 
assailing the Government. On the one side, the League 
was being upheld from pulpit and platform; on the other, 
the executive was choking its prisons with its arrests of 
"suspected'' Land Leaguers. Evictions had not de- 
creased, and there were frequent collisions between the 
police and the people, and blood was spilled on both sides. 
At first the Government arrests were confined to members 
of the League, who, although prominent enough in their 
own localities, were little known outside of Ireland. But Mr. 



EKGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 131 

John Dillon^s action soon attracted the notice of the Govern- 
ment; and, after a speech which he dehvered at Grange- 
mailer, near Clonmel, in May, which counseled an extreme 
form of boycotting, he was arrested and put into prison. A 
short while before, the Government had roused great in- 
dignation among the Irish ecclesiastics by arresting and 
imprisoning Father Eugene Sheehy, of Kilmallock. These 
were the most important arrests made, at first, under the 
new Coercion Acts. The Land League was still flourish- 
ing. Mr. Sexton, M. P., hurried to Dublin from London 
to take Mr. Dillon^ s place at the head of the League in 
L'eland. 

When the Coercive Acts had passed into law, every one's 
thoughts turned at once to the promised Land Act. But 
there were some other matters to be disposed of before the 
new Land Bill could be introduced. There was a debate 
on Candahar. The Army Discipline Bill, definitely abol- 
ishing flogging for soldiers, had to pass through its various 
stages. Then there was the Budget. On Monday, April 
4, Mr. Gladstone made his financial statement in a speech 
of over two hours. It was not a very startling or original 
Budget. The estimated expenditure for the ensuing year 
was figured at £84,705,000, and the revenue at £85,990, 
000. This showed a surplus of £1,285,000, which was, 
however, reduced to £1,185,000 by a vote for the extin- 
guishment, of the loan for barracks. The Prime Minister 
proposed to reduce the income tax to fivepence. This re- 
ductioD created a deficiency, which he proposed to meet by 
an adjustment of the surtax on foreign spirits. The proc- 
ess of distillation, as practiced on wines, would be applied 
to them, and a uniform surtax of fourpence per gallon 
would be charged on the standard of strength. By this 
tax, and some changes in the probate, legacy, and adminis- 
tration duties, Mr. Gladstone hoped to have a total gain of 
£570,000, which would convert the deficit of £275,000 into 
a surplus of £295,000. The Budget being disposed of, the 
ground was now clear for the Land Bill, which was intro- 
duced, accordingly, by the Prime Minister on Thursday, 
April 7, 1881. 



133 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 



/CHAPTER VIII. 

ME. DISRAELI — LORD BEACONSFIELD. 



it 



The breaking of so great a thing should make a 
greater crack/" says the triumphant Octavius, in magnani- 
mous tribute to his dead rival; *' the round world should 
have shook lions into civil streets, and citizens . to their 
dens."*" Some such thought must have come into the 
minds of many men when they heard, on that chill April 
morning of 1881, that Lord Beaconsfield was dead. ** The 
death of Anthony is not a single doom; in the name lay a 
moiety of the world."' The English world, the world of 
politics,- and the romantic world of fiction, had lost a moiety 
of itself by the death of Lord Beaconsfield. Seldom, in- 
deed, had a rarer spirit steered humanity; and as for the 
faults he had, even his enemies were not likely to think too 
deeply upon them just then. The gods will give us some 
faults to make us men; and whatever the errors of Lord 
Beaconsfield "s career, they had no need to be remembered 
in his epitaph. 

His had not been a long and protracted illness. Toward 
the end of March, 1881, it became known that Lord Bea- 
consfield was slightly ailing. Then it was announced that 
he was suffering from a severe attack of bronchial asthma, 
but was progressing favorably. As the days went by the 
reports announced no diminution of the illness, but the 
bulletins were still hopeful. Indeed, no alarm was felt 
generally until close to the end, though crowds of visitors 
of all kinds came every day to the house in Ourzon Street 
to read the bulletins and testify their sympathy. But the 
third week in April began with bitter winds — the fatal east 
winds that had killed Cobden, and that were now to kill 
Lord Beaconsfield. On the night of Monday, April 18, he 
sunk into a deep stupor, from which he never awoke. At 
half-past four on the morning of Tuesday, the 19th, he 
died, very quietly, without a sign of pain, Avithout a word. 
We have all heard and read much of the death-beds and 
death- words of great men; we like to think of Goethe's 
dying lips murmuring something about a beautiful woman's 
face {ind hair, of Napoleon thinking of the head of his 



EiN'GLAKD UlSTDEK GLADSTOJ^TE. 133 

army. Lord Beaconsfield passed away in silence; but we 
learn from those who stood about him, that some quarter 
of an hour before his death he raised himself a little in his 
bed, stretched himself out in the old' familiar way that was 
his wont when rising to reply in debate, and that his lips 
moved in silence. Perhaps the dying statesman's brain 
was dimly conscious of his former struggles and triumphs; 
of those speeches which the House of Commons at first re- 
fused to hear, and which, afterward, the House of Com- 
mons was so often willing to hear, and to admire, and to 
obey. It was fitting that his last thoughts should have 
been given to the great arena in which he had fought so 
long and so well. 

How will it be with him when all is retrospect?' ' Cob- 
den had once asked a friend, speaking of Mr. Disraeli and 
his brilliant career. It is a grim question to ask about the 
life of any man, and very hard to answer. To the pure, 
simple soul of Cobden there was much in the career of Lord 
Beaconsfield, as there must have been much in the career 
of every great statesman the world has seen, that was repel- 
lent. Cobden may be said to have been almost devoid of 
personal ambition. His whole soul was absorbed in carry- 
ing out his task, in executing the mission for the good of 
his fellow-men which he believed himself called upon^ and, 
indeed, was called upon, to fulfill. But it would be, in- 
deed, unfair and unjust to test the characters and careers 
of great statesmen by the life of so exceptional a man as 
Cobden— unfair and unjust to assume that ambitious men 
had no sense of duty to the world and to humanity. Test- 
ed by the standard of the Sermon on the Mount, where is 
the statesman, where is the leader of men, that can be 
praised? ^Pericles is no purer than Bolingbroke, Washing- 
ton scarce nobler than Richelieu, when tried before that 
court. If we judge Lord Beaconsfield severely, we must 
judge others severely as well, and we shall find that he will 
not want companions in condemnation. If it is sinful to 
be ambitious, to make Avars, to extend empire, other states- 
men have been ambitious and warlike and aggressive. Let 
us believe, even those of us who are least in sympathy with 
the policy and the politics of Lord Beaconsfield, that he, 
no less than others, was animated by the consciousness of 
his own righteousness of purpose; that he sought the wel- 
fare of his coiintrymen and the honor of his country; and 



134 EKGLAN-D UNDER GLADSTOITE. 

that if his way was not our way, we need not, in the seren- 
ity of our own infallibility, be too severe upon him. 

Lord Beaconsfield may fairly be called a great man, on 
his own definition of a great man, as '' one who affects the 
mind of his generation; whether he be a monk in his 
cloister agitating Christendom, or a monarch crossing the 
Granicus and giving a new character to the Pagan world. " 
Lord Beaconsfield certainly affected the mind of his gener- 
ation; and the part he chose to play, in doing so, was more 
akin to that of Alexander than that of a Jerome or a Mar- 
tin Luther. Indeed, the difficulties that the young Dis- 
raeli had to encounter in his career were scarcely less im- 
posing than those which ojjposed, but did not retard, the 
progress of the Macedonian king; nor were the victories of 
the one less splendid than the triumphs of the other. The 
young Disraeli began life as a Jew, when to be a Jew 
meant to be deprived of every social and civil advantage 
that makes a public career worth striving for. The posi- 
tion of a conquered Samnite in a world of Roman citizens 
was scarcely more galling than the position of a Jew in 
England in the early part of the present century. He was 
not, it is true, any longer tortured at the pleasure of 
prince or noble; he was no longer condemned to dwell in a 
ghetto, or wear garments of peculiar cut or color; but all, 
or almost all, chances of political promotion were closed 
against him in his adopted country. He might amass 
fortune, he might win distinction in letters and the arts; 
but he could not place his foot on the lowest round of the 
ladder that led to political distinction. These difficulties 
did not long restrain and impede the young Disraeli. He 
had been brought ujd a Christian. As a Christian he could 
enter the Pariiament which it was then impossible for a 
Jew to enter; and once in Parliament, he felt that his 
career was clear before him, and his success certain. But 
though he never professed the religion of his race, Disraeli 
never forgot his reverence for that race, nor his love for 
the people from whom he sprung. In his writings, in his 
speeches, in all the actions of his life, he was the cham- 
pion, and a most powerful and effective chamj^ion, of the 
Jewish people. Into the mouth of his favorite character, 
Sidonia, he puts an eloquent tribute to the genius and the 
glory of the Jewish race, which represents his own convic- 
tions, and the principles which governed him during the 



Ei^'GLAKD UKDER GLADSTOKE. 135 

whole of a career that was in itself the most eloquent tribute 
to the genius of his people. 

Here and there throughout the history of the world a 
few poets, and politicians who might have been poets, have 
recognized with just pride their own genius and certain im- 
mortality. Horace, writing lyrics more enduring than 
brass; Shakespeare serenely confident that neither marble ' 
nor the gilded monuments of princes could outlast the 
powerful rhyme in which he praised his nameless hero — 
these are examples that leap to the lips at once. The 
young Disraeli, shouting to a mocking and hostile House 
that the time would come when they should hear him, is a 
no less remarkable example of justifiable self-glorification. 
He had entered the House in 1837, the year of the Queen ^s 
accession. He had already made a name, or, at least, a 
notoriety, for himself outside the House. He had made 
the grand tour; he had been in the East, at a time when 
Eastern travel was very much less common than it now is. 
He had written '' Vivian Grey,'^ one of the most brilliant 
novels of its time, and one of the most remarkable exam- 
ples of precocious genius on record. He had written 
" The Young Duke,^^ which, in spite of the scorn of 
Thackeray, may well be considered clever; and " Contarini 
Fleming,'^ which has at least in its earliest chapters some- 
thing of the romantic charm and adventurous attraction of 
** Gil Blas.^' He had made use of his acquaintance with 
the East in the wondrous " Tale of Alroy.^"* His " Ixion 
in Heaven .'' was one of the most humorous bits of burlesque 
writing of the age. He had essayed to stand with Dante 
and with Milton in his " Revolutionary Epic,^^ and had 
certainly not succeeded. As a political pamphleteer he had 
vindicated the British Constitution, and penned the " Let- 
ters of Runnymede.''^ He was thus a sufficiently conspicu- 
ous character when in 1837, after three unsuccessful 
efforts, he found himself at last in the House of Commons. 
It is not quite easy to understand why that famous first 
speech was so hopeless a failure. The recorded costume of 
the orator was odd enough to us, but in 1837 a bottle-green 
frock coat, a white waistcoat laced with chains, and large 
fancy pantaloons would not of themselves have been enough 
to move the House of Commons to mirth. The speech 
itself, as we read it now after the lapse of nearly half a 
century, appears an exceedingly clever speech; and the 



136 ENOLAKD UKDER GLADSTOKE. 

House of Commons is usually disposed to listen to clever 
speeches, whatever may be tlie view they express. His 
skill in political phrase-making was well foreshadowed in 
his description of the Irish Liberal Fund as a * * project of 
majestic mendicancy. '* We smile and feel that the speaker 
is making good strokes when he speaks of '' the new loves 
and the old loves, in which so much of passion and recrimi- 
nation was mixed . up between the noble Tityrus of the 
Treasury bench and tlie learned Daphne of Liskeard/^ and 
alludes to the " amantium. ires, which had resulted in the 
amorifi iniegratio, notwithstanding a political duel had 
been fought, in which more than one shot was exchanged, 
but in which recourse was had to the secure arbitrament of 
blank cartridges. ' ' All this is youthful, but it is bright 
enough; it certainly is not dull, and it does not seem 
ridiculous. But the House of Commons would have none 
of it, and laughed and jeered and hooted the speaker into 
a sudden blaze of anger. '' I have begun many things, 
and I have succeeded often at last; ay, sir, and though I 
sit down now, yet the time will come when you will hear 
me." 

It is not here necessary to 'tell again the story of Lord 
Beaconsfield^'s life. It has been told many times — on two 
occasions very bitterly and brilliantly by his enemies; and, 
unfortunately, generally very badly and drearily by his 
friends. Few books would be more welcome to the world 
than Lord Beaconsfield's autobiography. It would, no 
doubt, deserve a place on the shelf where stand '^ Dichtung 
und Wahrheit " and " Les Confessions." The life of 
Lord Beaconsfield has yet to be written. To be done fit- 
tingly, its writer should be, if possible, committed to neither 
of the great political parties; but if absolute impartiality 
were impossible, then the chronicler should have a bias of 
affection and of sympathy toward the subject of his record. 
Those biographies are cold reading which find their inspira- 
tion in hatred or contempt of the life they are recording. 
The biography of the admirer is like the votive wreath 
placed about the monumental pillar; the biography of the 
adversary reminds us only of the actions of those Egyptian 
kings who effaced the hieroglyphics of their rivals from 
shrine and temple, and hoped to attain immortality by sub- 
stituting their own. 

In the Upper House Lord Beaconsfield delivered some 



El^GLAND UKDEE GLADSTONE. 137 

telling speeches, even after the fall of his Government and 
the triumph of his rival. The last speech he ever deliv- 
ered, that on the Central Asian question and the abandon- 
ment of Oandahar, had something in it of the youthful fire 
and the youthful audacity of Mr. Disraeli. He was speak- 
ing of tlie key of India. " The key of India/' hedeclai-ed, 
*' was not at Merv. It was not at Oandahar. It was not 
at — " here for a moment the speaker paused; he could not 
recollect the name of Herat Another man might have 
been discomposed, but Lord Beaconsfield coolly went on> 
*' the key of India is not the place of which I have forgot- 
ten the name; the key of India is in London. '^ It was 
characteristic of Lord Beaconsfield that his career should 
close with such a speech, remarkable alike for the cool in- 
difference with which he was always ready to treat the de- 
tails of the most important subjects, and for the brilliantly 
paradoxical saying which concealed a profound political 
truth. Not many weeks later Lord Beaconsfield was dead. 
The world had lost one of its most interesting figures, and 
England one of the most remarkable in the long roll of 
remarkable statesmen who have given their allegiance and 
their genius to the service of the House of Brunswick. 



CHAPTER IX. 

THELAKDAOT. 

The history of the new Land Bill was curious. The 
measure which Mr. Gladstone laid before the House on 
April 7 was not the measure which the Government had i 
originally intended to offer to Parliament. Another Bill 
had been prepared, of a less comprehensive nature. The 
draft had been submitted by a member of the Ministry to 
a Liberal member, who was very properly regarded as an 
authority on the land question in Ireland, with the request 
that he would make any suggestions he thought fit as to its 
possible improvement. The member consulted returned 
the draft Bill promptly, saying that the only improvement 
he could suggest would be to put the proposed measure be- 
hind the fire. The Government apparently acted upon 
this summary advice; at least, they speedily prepared a 



138 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

new and more advanced measure. Even the new Bill was 
mild enough, and bore very little resemblance to the form 
it came to assume later on. Mr. Gladstone introduced the 
Bill on April 7, 1881, in a long, elaborate, and exceedingly- 
eloquent speech, on what he not inappropriately called 
** the most difficult and the most complex question '' which 
he ever had to deal with in the course of his public life. 
Roughly speaking, the Bill proposed to deal with the Irish 
land question on th6 basis of what was known as the three 
F's — ^fair rent, fixity of tenure, and free sale. Mr. Glad- 
stone denied that either the iniquity of the existing land 
laws, or any sympathy with the extreme views of some of 
the Irish land reformers, or the bad conduct of Irish land- 
lordism in general, called for the new attempt at legisla- 
tion. It was the " land hunger,^ ^ or rather the land 
scarcity; it was certain defects in the Land Act of 1870, 
and it was the rack-renting and evictions of a limited num- 
ber of landlords which had inspired the action of the Gov- 
ernment. 

The Government was not in want of guidance in the step 
it was taking. A commission — the Richmond Commission 
— ^had been appointed by the previous Government to in- 
quire into the land question. Another commission — the 
Bessborough Commission — had been appointed by the exist- 
ing Government for the same purpose. These two com- 
missions had begot, not two reports, but a perfect " litter " 
of reports. There was naturally an agreeable diversity of 
opinion among these various reports. One member of the 
Richmond Commission, Mr. Bonamy Price, was for aj)ply- 
ing, " in all their unmitigated authority,'^ the principles 
of abstract political economy to the very exceptional land 
question of Ireland, '' exactly as if he had been proposing 
to legislate for the inhabitants of Saturn or Jupiter.'"' Of 
the four commissioners who made up the Bessborough Com- 
mission, only two agreed to sign what may be called the 
main report: Mr. Shaw signed one collateral report. The 
0' Conor Don signed another, and Mr. Kavanagh signed a 
third. Out of this multiplicity of counsel, however, Mr. 
Gladstone found that, with the exception of Mr. Bonamy 
Price, the whole body of both commissions were agreed in 
supporting the constitution of a court for the purpose of 
dealing with the differences between landlords and tenants 
in Ireland with regard to rent. 



ENOLAKD UKDEU GLaDSTOKE. 13& 

The establishment of such a court was to be then one of 
the principal features of the new measure. Appeal to this 
court was to be optional, and not compulsory. Every ten- 
ant from year to year coming under the description of 
"present tenant^' could go before the court and have a 
judicial rent fixed for his holding. This judicial rent was 
to last J in the first instance, for fifteen years, during which 
no eviction would be possible, except for non-payment of 
rent or distinct breach of specific covenants. When the 
fifteen years expired, landlord or tenant might apply to the 
court for a revision of the rent. If the tenancy were re- 
newed, the same conditions as to eviction were to hold 
good. In the case, however, of the tenant wishing to sell 
his tenant-right, the privilege of pre-emption, at the price 
fixed by the court as the value of the tenant-right, was 
reserved to the landlord. The Bill acted retrospectively 
with regard to. tenants against whom process of ejectment 
had been begun but not concluded. The Ulster tenant, 
while remaining under the privilege of his custom, was to 
be allowed the protection of the general provisions of the 
Bill for controlling augmentation of rents. The new 
court, which was also to perform the functions of a land 
commission, was to consist of three members, one of whom 
was always to be a judge or ex-judge of the supreme court. 
It was empowered to appoint sub-commissions as courts of 
first instance, to hear applications and fix fair rents. 

The second part of the Bill passed entirely from the re- 
gion of the three F^s into the diflicult question of peasant 
proprietary. The court, as a land commission, was em- 
powered to assist tenants to purchase their holdings, and 
furthermore to purchase itself estates from willing land- 
lords, for the purpose of reselling them when three fourths 
of the tenants were ready to buy. The court might ad- 
vance three fourths of the purchase-money to tenants, and 
was not to be prohibited from advancing the whole sum 
when it saw fit. Tenants availing themselves of these 
purchase clauses would obtain a guarantee title, and would 
only have to pay a very small sum for legal costs. Emigra- 
tion was to be included among the purposes for which ad- 
vances might be made. Such were the more striking feat- 
ures of the new measure. 

The Bill was read a first time without opposition, and 
immediately after, on the following day, the House ad- 



140 -KKGLAND UKDER OLADSTOKE. 

jouriied for the Easter recess. When it reassembled oil 
April 25 the second reading of the Land Bill was moved at 
once- The debates were long and bitter. The Conserva- 
tive party as a body opposed the Bill with unwearying vigi- 
lance and vehemence. They characterized it again and 
again as a measure of communism, of socialism, of brig- 
andage ; and they exhausted their ingenuity in efforts, if 
not to defeat the Bill altogether, at least to delay it as long 
as possible, and to minimize as much as might be its 
^* revolutionary "^ nurture. The Irish members, on the 
other hand, were no less energetic in their efforts to widen 
the scope oi the Bill, and make it of a character more 
markedly beneficial to the tenant class. Their efforts were 
more successful than those of the Conservative party. The 
general principles of the Bill remained the same, but its 
scope was widened, and its powers of apjjlication strength- 
ened to a surprising degree. The Bill in the final form in 
which it was jiresented to the House of Lords in the end of 
July, after months of protracted debate, might be not- un- 
fairly characterized as in large part the creation of Mr. 
Healy and the Irish party, of Mr. Charles Russell and cer- 
tain of the Ulster members. The sleeper in the Arabian 
story scarcely underwent a more remarkable metamorphosis 
when he assumed the care and dignity of the Kalif than 
was experienced by the iiew Bill in its passage from the 
Treasury bench to the Upper House. It is only necessary 
to compare the original draft of the Bill with its final form 
to see h^w important these alterations were. The famous 
Healy clause was constructed to exclude altogether the 
valuation of improvements made by the tenant in estimat- 
ing the amount to be fixed as a judicial rent. On the other 
hand, an amendment by Mr. Heneage was agreed to, ex- 
cluding what are called "^ English-managed " estates from 
the operation of the Healy clause. The court was em- 
powered by another provision to quash leases contracted 
since 1870 which might be shown on examination to have 
been drawn up with a view to dodging or defeating the ob- 
jects of that measure. The emigration proposals, which 
were extremely obnoxious to the Irish party, were very 
largelv modified. The total expenditure for this purpose 
was limited to £200,000, not more than a third of which 
was to be spent in any single year. A clause was intro- 
duced allowing the commissioners to make advances to 



BNGLAKD XTHDER GLADS'tOKE. 141 

tenants for the purpose of clearing off arrears of rent which 
had accrued for three years. 

On July 29 the Bill was read a third time in the House 
of Commons, and was carried up to the House of Lords, 
where it was read a first time for formes sake, without op- 
position, the same evening. After two nights^ debate it 
was read a second time without division, in obedience to 
Lord Salisbury's counsels. In committee, however, the 
majority in the Lords fell upon the measure. They re- 
duced the Bill to a nullity by comprehensive interpolations 
and additions. They altered, they amended, ^they substi- 
tuted, till the Bill resembled Wallenstein's horse as shown 
by Brown, Jones, and Robinson. The head, legs, and 
part of the body are new, all the rest is the real horse. 
The Bill in this '^^ real -horse '^ condition was returned to 
the Commons. The Ministry accepted a few of the least 
important amendments, modified some others, and firmly 
rejected those which struck at the vitality of the measure. 
It was sent back to the Lords again, and once again the 
Lords, with that marvelous infatuation which is the pecul- 
iar privilege of the Upper House in its struggles with the 
Commons, proceeded to make the measure useless by rein- 
stating the objectionable amendments and interpolations. 
The Bill was then sent down to the Commons. The Min- 
istry made a further pretense of considering the question. 
The more dangerous amendments which the Lords had 
restored were struck out, but the Ministry made certain 
concessions. In the first form of the Healy claus^ for in- 
stance, the Government had insisted upon a proviso that 
the tenant should not be allowed the value of improvements 
for which he liad been paid by the landlord. The Govern- 
ment now conceded the addition *' or otherwise com- 
pensated." Under these words Irish courts can, as in the 
case of Adams and Dunseath, rule that length of enjoyment 
is to be taken into account as an element in considering the 
value of a tenant^ s improvement. The Bill was then 
handed back to the Lords. By this time public feeling 
was thoroughly aroused at the prospect of a serious consti- 
tutional struggle between the two Houses. Liberal meet- 
ings were held in all parts of the country, at which the 
Government were vigorously encouraged to make no con- 
cessions, to fight the fight out to the end. The Lords 
blustered, but their courage was shaken. Two of the most 



142 EKGLAND UKDER GLADSTOKE. 

comprehensively destructive of the Lords' amendments had 
been moved by the Duke of Argjdl and Lord Lansdowne. 
On August 16, when the Bill came before the Lords for the 
third time, Lord Salisbury still assumed a semi-defiant at- 
titude. Perhaps on the whole, he said, their lordshiiDs had 
better accept the Bill, unless indeed the Duke of Argyll 
and Lord Lansdowne pressed their amendments. In that 
case Lord Salisbury would certainly vote for them, and for 
resistance to the imjDerious Commons. But the Duke of 
Argyll was conveniently absent. Lord Lansdowne sat in 
his seat and made no sign. Lord Salisbury had sounded 
his trumpet, and no knight challenger galloped into the 
arena. So, with something of an ill grace. Lord Salisbury 
bade those of his inclining hold their hands, and the Land 
Bill of 1881 became law. The House of Lords had gained 
nothing by their 0232:)Osition, but, for the moment at least, 
they were saved from the consequences of direct collision 
with the Commons. 

In the meantime the Bradlaugh case had come up again. 
Mr. Bradlaugh, as we have seen, had taken the affirmation 
and his seat under all the penalties that might come upon 
him if his so doing were decided to be illegal. He was at 
once sued for penalties by a man named Clarke, who, as 
was afterward shown, was a mere man of straw sustained 
by Mr. NewdegatCp The judge of the court of law in 
which Mr. Bradlaugh was sued decided that the statute 
allowing affirmation to be made in certain cases in lieu of 
taking the oath did not apply to Mr. Brad laugh's case, 
and did not, therefore, exempt him from the obligation of 
taking the usual oath, and from the penalties consequent 
upon his failure to do so. The case was brought before 
the Court of Appeal, where the judgment of the lower 
court was confirmed. Mr. Labouchere moved for a new 
writ. Mr. Bradlaugh stood again for Northampton, and 
was re-elected by a majority of 132 over his Conservative 
opponent, Mr. Corbett, on Saturday, A23ril 9, 1881. On 
Tuesday, April 26, Mr. Bradlaugh presented himself in the 
House of Commons, and offered to take the oath. He had 
been escorted to the table by Mr. Labouchere and Mr. 
Burt, and the clerk was proceeding to administer the oath, 
when Sir Stafford Northcote got up to interpose. The 
Speaker immediately rose, and announced that although 
under ordinary circumstances a member presenting himselt 



ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 143 

to comply with the legal formalities of the House was en- 
titled to do so without interruption, yet, having regard to the 
former resolution of the House, and the reports of the two 
select committees, he did not think it his duty to withhold 
from the House an opportunity of expressing its opinions 
on the new conditions. He accordingly desired Mr. Brad- 
laugh to retire while the question was being considered by 
the House, and Mr. Bradlaugh accordingly retired, after 
asking that the House would not decide upon his case be- 
fore it had heard him speak in his own defense. An active 
debate, led by Sir Stafford Northcote, immediately followed. 
The Opposition maintained that the House could not look 
on and allow any one to go through the solemn formality 
of taking the oath after having publicly proclaimed that 
the essential conditions which made such an oath binding 
were absent from his mind. The Ministerial speakers, on 
the other hand, argued that they had nothing whatever to 
do with Mr. Bradlaugh^ s belief or disbelief; and that if the 
newly elected member for Northam|)ton was ready to take 
the oath the House had no alternative but to allow him to 
do so, in spite of any declarations he might have made as 
to the binding nature of the obligation. Mr. Bradlaugh 
was heard at the Bar during the course of the debate, urg- 
ing his case with energy and with eloquence, and warning 
the House that to -deny him his legal right would throw 
him back on agitation. The Opposition, however, carried 
the day. Sir Stafford Northcote - had put his protest into 
the form of a motion that, having regard to the former 
resolutions and the reports of the- committees, Mr. Brad- 
laugh should not be permitted to go through the form of 
repeating the words of the oath prescribed by the statute. 
This motion was carried by a majority of 33 — 208 to 175. 
When the numbers were declared Mr. Bradlaugh again ad- 
vanced to the table. He was immediately called upon to 
withdraw by the Speaker, but he refused to obey, declaring 
that the order was illegal. There was great confusion in 
the House, members of all parties shouting out their opin- 
ions more or less inarticulately. The Speaker asked the 
noisy House for instructions as to how he should proceed. 
The Tories yelled for Mr. Gladstone to get up; the Liberals 
shrieked back indignant refusal. After an interval of con- 
fused clamor, during which Mr. Bradlaugh stood in the 
center of the House before the table, like the hero of ¥im- 



144 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

berths *' Salammbo '^ among his Oartliaginian enemies. Sir 
Stafford Northcote rose,, with bland curiosity, to inquire 
whether the Prime Minister intended to take any steps in 
regard to the resolution that the House had Just agreed to. 
The Prime Minister replied, in a studiously composed tone, 
that he had voted with the minority, and that it was the 
duty of the majority, and not of .the Ministry, to carry out 
the resolution. Sir Stafford Northcote accordingly, 
promptly assuming the leadership of the House, moved 
that Mr. Bradlaugh be ordered to withdraw. The motion 
was, of course, carried, and the Speaker ordered Mr. Brad- 
laugh to retire. Mr. Bradlaugh refusing, as before, the 
sergeant-at-arms was called in to enforce the order of the 
House. In company with Captain Gosset Mr. Bradlaugh 
retired to the Bar of the House, only to rush forward again 
to the table. The sergeant-at-arms then called to his aid 
a little army of messengers, who forced Mr. Bradlaugh — 
offering, however, no resistance, and j^rotesting against the 
use of physical force — back to the Bar. As he seemed de- 
termined to fight his way again to the table, the Speaker 
once more appealed to the House for guidance. A scene 
of sharp recrimination followed. Sir Stafford Northcote 
taunting the Government with abetting Mr. Bradlaugh in 
his action, and Mr. Gladstone warmly denying the accusa- 
tion. Mr. Cowen interrujDted the strife by a motion for 
adjournment of the House, wliich was j^i'omptly carried. 

The next day, Wednesday, April. 27, 1881, Mr. Brad- 
laugh again presented himself at the table, again demanded 
to be sworn; again was ordered by the Speaker to with- 
draw, and again refused to do so, until the sergeant-at- 
arms came to take him by the arm. A n^w debate sprung 
up, the Opposition and the Ministerialists repeating their 
old arguments, and the convictions of everybody remaining 
entirely unchanged. At length a sort of general under- 
standing seemed to be arrived at, according to which the 
Government would bring in, as soon as might be, some 
measure for remedying the law which regulated the for- 
malities of the Parliamentary oath; and on this understand- 
ing it was announced by Mr. Labouchere that Mr. Brad- 
laugh would refrain from presenting liimself at the table 
of the House for the present. As a consequence of this 
understanding the Attorney-General, on Monday, May 2, 
moved for leave to introduce the Parliamentary Oaths 



ENGLAND UKDEK GLADSTONE. 145 

Bill, allowing members to make affirmation. But the bill 
was vigorously opposed, and several nights passed without 
any progress being made with the measure. Mr. Brad- 
laugh thereupon made his appearance in the House again 
on Tuesday, May 10, when the now familiar ceremony was 
gone through. Mr. Bradlaugh offered to take the oath, 
was ordered to withdraw by -the Speaker, and refused to do 
so until the sergeant-at-arms brought the semblance of 
physical force to bear upon him. Then Sir Stafford North- 
cote, once more assuming his function of leader of the 
House, moved that the sergeant-at-arms should exclude 
Mr. Bradlaugh from the House until he should engage not 
to disturb the proceedings of the House further — a motion 
which was carried without a division. 

For some weeks nothing further was heard of the Brad- 
laugh question in the House of Commons. On July 4, 
however, Mr. Gladstone announced that the Government 
did not intend to proceed with the Parliamentary Oaths 
Bill that session. Mr. Bradlaugh immediately wrote to 
the Speaker, announcing his intention of presenting him- 
self again and claiming his right to take the oath and his 
seat. The Speaker read the letter to the House, and in- 
formed the House that he had given special directions to 
the sergeant-at-arms to carry out the resolution of May 
10. Mr. Bradlaugh did not, however, follow up his letter 
immediately. He attended meetings in various places, oc- 
cupied himself in obtaining a summons at Bow Street 
against Mr. ISTewdegate for ^* maintenance " in giving in- 
demnity for costs to the man who prosecuted him, and 
seemed in no hurry to claim his seat. On Wednesday, 
August 3, however, Mr. Bradlaugh made the attempt. He 
held a great meeting in Trafalgar Square on Tuesday, 
August 2, at which he announced his intention of proceed- 
ing to the House of Commons and taking his seat. Under 
the impression that he was about to do so then and there, 
a cheering, excitable crowd of some five thousand persons 
poured down Whitehall and through Parliament Street 
into Parliament Square, and tried to flood Palace Yard 
with noisy humanity. A strong body of police were, how- 
ever, in readiness; and though some score or so of people 
succeeded in getting in, the gates were speedily closed, and 
the shouting crowd effectually excluded. It soon became 
understood that the next day's demonstration was to be 



146 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

more serious. Long before midday on Wednesday, August 
3, a crowd, at least as large as that of the preceding day, 
had collected in Parliament Square, cheering for Mr. Brad- 
laugh, and greeting with loud acclaim the various deputa- 
tions that came up bearing petitions pra3ang that Mr. Brad- 
laugh be allowed to take his seat. Palace Yard was guard- 
ed carefully by a very large force of police, and the bulk of 
the crowd were kept outside the gates in perfect order. 
But the bearers of petitions were allowed to come inside 
the gates, and to range themselves in order in Westminster 
Hall. At about twenty minutes to twelve Mr. Bradlaugh, 
accompanied by his friend Dr. Aveling, arrived before the 
gates of Palace Yard, and was at once admitted, amidst 
the wildest enthusiasm on the part of the crowd. Once in- 
side Palace Yard, Mr. Bradlaugh was met by Inspector 
Denning, who quietly asked him what he proposed to do. 
Mr. Bradlaugh as quietly answered that he had come to ' 
take his seat; and entering Westminster Hall, where the 
ranged line of petitioners greeted him lustily, he passed in 
through the members' entrance, and so into the lobby, and 
to the very door of the Chamber. Here Mr. Bradlaugh 
stood and waited until the Speaker should take the chair, 
the central figure of a crowd of excited and wondering 
members. The scene was strange enough. Across the 
door the sergeant-at-arms and his assistants were ranged, 
and near them were several of the House messengers, and 
some dozen policemen. The lobby was crowded by curious 
members — and by members only, as the strictest orders 
had been given and obeyed that day to let none but mem- 
bers and officials of the House into the inner lobby. As 
soon as the Speaker had taken the chair, Mr. Bradlaugh} 
who had been standing perfectly self-possessed in the 
middle of the lobby, advanced to the door of the Chamber. 
His path was immediately barred by Mr. Erskine, who 
courteously inquired what he^ wanted. By those who 
crushed about and craned forward to hear the remarkable 
dialogue, Mr. Bradlaugh was heard to reply that, as the 
duly elected member for Northampton, he had come to 
take the oath and his seat. Mr. Erskine answered that he 
had received orders not to admit Mr. Bradlaugh, and Mr. 
Bradlaugh responded that such orders were illegal, and 
that he had a right to enter. Once again Mr. Bradlaugh 
urged his right of entry, and once again Mr. Erskine 



EKGLAKD UKDEE GLADSTOKi:. lit 

pleaded his orders, and refused him admission. The con- 
versation was carried on gravely and decorously on both 
sides, but the greatest excitement governed the crowd who 
surrounded the pair, and who listened to the dialogue while 
watching the well-guarded door. When Mr. Erskine made 
his final refusal to allow Mr. Bradlaugh passage, Mr. 
Bradlaugh immediately stepped forward as if to push his 
way into the Chamber. He was at once stopped by the 
officials; he offered resistance to their efforts, and in a mo- 
ment was engaged in a sort of scuffle with one of them. 
Then followed probably one of the most extraordinary and 
painful scenes that the House of Commons had ever wit- 
nessed since Cochrane, the gallant Dundonald, the last of 
the Sea Kings, was hauled from the House fighting with all 
the strength of his giant frame. The policemen who had 
been waiting in readiness seized Mr. Bradlaugh, and pro- 
ceeded to drag him away from the entrance to the Cham- 
ber. Mr. Bradlaugh is a man of great physical strength, 
and he exerted himself to the utmost to free himself from 
those who held him. The spectators in the lobby hurriedly 
made way, and in the midst of the policemen Mr. Brad- 
laugh, offering a vigorous resistance, was hurried through 
the door of the lobby and down the stairs leading to the 
members" entrance, and so out into Palace Yard, where he 
was released, hatless, breathless, with his coat torn from 
the violence of the struggle that had just ensued. The 
police, it must be stated, did all that was possible under 
the conditions of the struggle not to hurt Mr. Bradlaugh; 
but it was impossible that the strife could have been other 
than severe and exhausting, when a man of powerful build 
was being carried, struggling with all his might, down-stairs 
and through narrow passages. For a moment there was a 
danger, or at least the possibility, of a conflict between the 
police and the crowd, as Mr. Bradlaugh stood there dis- 
arrayed, exhausted, and excited, in the sight of his follow- 
ers. Men of all kinds were present in the crowd of Mr. 
Bradlaugh" s supporters that day, inside and outside the 
gates of Palace Yard, who would have been willing enough 
to use force to assist their leader. One man at least in 
that crowd deserves special consideration, James Thomson, 
true poet and brilliant writer, author of " The City of 
Dreadful Night,"" a poem whose profound pessimism is 
illumined by a melancholy beauty, and of some even more 



%4S ENGLAHD UNDER ULADbTUJ^E. 

valuable songs of the joys and pleasures of the poor. 
Thomson had been of old a friend and follower of Mr. 
Bradlaugh; their ways of thought had varied of late, and 
their paths had separated; but here, in the moment of 
difficulty, Thomson came to do all he could for the cause 
which he believed to be just, the cause of his old friend. 
Thomson^s wild genius and splendid gifts came to a sad 
end some eighteen months later, when he died suddenly in 
a hospital, still a young man, leaving behind him only a 
brilliant memory and some verses of great fulfillment and 
greater promise. His career was not unlike that of Henri 
Murger, or some of his clever, eccentric companions. Like 
Murger^s, it was erratic, fitful, full of gifts and promise; 
like Murger' s, it came to an end too soon, and very sadly; 
like Murger's, it was much regretted. 

Mr. Bradlaugh, however, made no appeal to his followers 
to come to his aid. Those who clustered about him were 
dispersed by the police. Mr. Bradlaugh drank some water 
and waited peaceably talking to Inspector Denning, until 
he received information that the House had, by its vote, 
approved of the action that had been taken. He then 
drove across to Westminster police court, to ask for a sum- 
mons for formal assault against Inspector Denning. The 
magistrate, Mr. Sheil, found the case invoh'ed too many 
technicalities and complications to admit of his granting 
the summons just then; and Mr. Bradlaugh withdrew by 
the magistrate's door leading into Vincent Square, at the 
request of the police authorities, in order to avoid a scene 
with the crowd outside. 

In the meantime much had been doing inside the House 
of Commons. As soon as Mr. Bradlaugh had been re- 
moved, Mr. Labouchere complained in the House of the 
treatment of his colleague, and made a motion censuring 
the sergeant-at-arms and the officials of the House for the 
manner in which they had interpreted and acted upon the 
resolution of May 10. The motion was seconded by Mr. 
Ashton Dilke, and an active debate immediately sprung 
up, which was chiefly remarkable for a speech made by 
Mr. Bright, in which he spoke feelingly of the way in 
which Mr. Bra<llaugh had been used, and warned the 
House that, if it persisted in its present course, it would 
bring itself into some most unfortunate and. calamitous 
position. In the end Mr. Labouchere' s motion was de- 



EKGLAKD UNDEE GLATDSTOiTE. M9 

feated by 191 to 7 — majority of 184; and an amendment 
of Sir Henry Holland's, pledging the House to approval of 
the action of Mr. Speaker and of the officers of the House 
acting under his order, was agreed to without a division. 

Save the Coercion and the Land Act, the session was 
unfruitful in Government legislation. With the exception 
of the Army Regulations Bill, which complemented Lord 
Card well" s Army Organization Bill by linking every regi- 
ment to a particular locality^ and finally did away with 
flogging in the army, and the Naval Discipline Amend- 
ment Act Amendment Bill, which abolished flogging in the 
navy, all the other legislative measures proposed by the 
Government were withdrawn. Some measures, however, 
introduced by private members became law. One was Earl 
Cairns' Conveyancing and Law of Property Bill, for sim- 
plifying and improving the practice of conveyancing, with 
its pendant, the Solicitors' .Remuneration Bill, providing 
for a uniform system -of charges for conveyancing. 
Another was Mr. Hutchinson's Newspaper Libel Bill, 
making an imjDortant change in the law of libel by extend- 
ing a privilege to the reports of meetings lawfully held, 
and by making the permission of the Attorney- General a 
necessary preliminary to a criminal information for libel. 
A Bill introduced and carried by Mr. Roberts enacted that 
in Wales all premises in which intoxicating liquors were 
sold should be closed during the whole of Sunday. There 
were some changes in tlie Administration. Mr. Grant 
Duff was appointed to the Governorship of Madras. Mr. 
Leonard Courtney went to the Colonial Ofiice. Mr. Her- 
bert Gladstone came into the Ministry as a supernumerary 
Lord of the Treasury. 

The Land Act had not disposed of Irish discontent or 
settled the Irish question. When Parliament rose, a great 
convention was held in Newcastle, at which Mr. Joseph 
Co wen spoke. Mr. Cowen was a brilliant speaker; he 
might fairly be called the foremost of all the younger gene- 
ration of Parliamentary orators. Thackeray once spoke 
of writing down the names of all his real friends on a very 
little piece of paper. A little piece of paper would be 
quite sufficient to write down the names of all the orators 
in St. Stephen's. After Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Bright 
comes Mr. Cowen. When he made his first speech in the 
House of Commons on the Bill which proposed to add the 



150 ENQLAKD UNDER GLADSTOKE. 

title of Empress of India to tlie dignities of the sovereign, 
all who heard it knew at once that a new and powerful 
force Avas added to the Parliamentary debates. From that 
hour Mr. Cowen took high rank as a political influence. 
The music of his phrases, the passion of his language, the 
grace and beauty of his sentences, and the honorable inde- 
pendence of thought which inspired all his utterances never 
lailed to make the majority of his hearers forget for the 
moment not merely the rough northern accent of the 
speaker, but the unpopularity of the opinions which he 
was expressing. It has been Mr. Cowen^s fortune gener- 
ally to support, in the House of Commons, causes unpopu- 
lar to the majority in the House. Like Hal o' the W}Tid, 
in Scott^s story, Mr. Cowen has always fought for his own 
hand. His was the most serious attack upon the Queen's 
Title Bill, much more serious, for example, than the 
speech of vitriolic bitterness in which Mr. Lowe refused to 
have the lispings of the nursery -foisted upon the House. 
Yet he made the best defense of the foreign policy of Lord 
Beaconsfield. 

Mr. Cowen has, in fact, what some people would veiy 
likely call old-fashioned notions of the duties of an inde- 
pendeut member. He does not beheve it to be a part of 
the duty of a member to accept the guidance of his polit- 
ical chief in all his actions, or to uphold that chief by voice 
and vote in every demand which he may make on the 
House of Commons and the country. He considers it to 
be the business of an independent politician to think for 
himself. When he imagines that his own party is in the 
wrong he is neither ashamed nor afraid to say so, and he is 
willing to admit that even a political enemy may at times 
have justice on his side, however unpalatable such an ad- 
mission may be to his own companions. Such a man is 
seldom greatly loved by any jwlitical party. T^he Treasury 
bench likes men upon whom it can always fully rely. 
Ministers are not very fond of being told their duty by 
their followers. They like absolute obedience, and unhesi- 
tating readiness to follow them into the division lobby. 
Such a follower Mr. Cowen can not be, and his sturdy in- 
dependence becomes important when it is accompanied by 
a gift of eloquence now rare in the English Houses of Par- 
liament. No Ministry cares much for the independence 
which can only express itself in a few brief, faltering, un- 

• 3k --p,***** 



El^GLAND FKDER GLADSTOKE. 151 

important sentences. But it is compelled to care very 
much for the independence which can express itself with 
the passion, the beauty, and the purpose which men know 
they have now to expect from Mr. Co wen. Mr. Oowen-'s 
early life brought him into close contact with men like 
Herzen and Kossuth and Louis Blanc. His youth was 
closeiy linked with the man whose name hung like a shadow 
over Europe for a season, with Joseph Mazzini. To his 
association with these men and their like Mr. Oowen owqs 
certain of the ideas which have made him stand somewhat 
alone in Parliament and in political life. But he has not 
borrowed his eloquence from them, or from any one else. 
He is an orator by nature, but it is his own earnestness, his 
own enthusiasm, his own unswerving honor and honesty, 
and no copying of the thoughts or the words of other men, 
which have given him a place among the comparativel}'- 
few orators of the first class that the Victorian age has 
produced. 

Mr. Oowen had been a persistent opponent of the coer- 
cive policy of the Government. He had spoken against it 
again and again; he had si^pported the Irish members 
time after time with his voice and with his vote in opposing 
the Bills. At the meeting in JSTewcastle-on-Tyne on Mon- 
day, August 29, 1881, he attacked the Government with 
all his energy and all his eloquence. It had been found 
useless, he said, to argue with the master of many legions, 
even when that master argued on the extraordinary para- 
dox that the only way in which the law could be maintained 
in Ireland was by its being superseded. The Land Act 
had failed as a means of pacification. It was too abstruse 
and complicated for plain men to understand, and its fair 
proportions were hidden by the repulsive screen of the 
Coercion Act. While he strongly condemned the wild 
writings and wild threats of the American Fenians, he at- 
tributed the fault of such writings and threats mainly to 
the action of the English Government itself. "No more 
barbarous or inhuman treatment had been attempted 
against political prisoners in modern days in Western 
Europe than was meted out by the English Government to 
the Fenians. By their treatment we converted men who 
might have been our friends into foes.''^ The outrages in 
Ireland,- on account of which the Government had demand- 
ed coercion, were, Mr, Oowen contended, shamefully exag- 



152 ENGLAND L-NDEK GLADSTOKE. 

gerated. The reason for the exaggeration was this: the 
Irish executive feared tliat a Liberal Parliament would not 
pass a Coercion Bill, and that they could only get it by 
showing that the country was greatly disturbed, and law 
superseded. They therefore made no attempt to use the 
oi*dinary law with a view to restrain incipient excess, and 
their strategy succeeded. There was no constitutional 
country in Europe, Mr. Cowen concluded, in which such a 
state of things obtained as it did in Ireland. It was a 
scandal to our civilization, and a disgrace to our statesman- 
ship. 

The convention at Newcastle was followed up by anotlief 
convention in Ireland, in the Dublin Eotunda, a conven- 
tion of delegates from the various branches of the Land 
League all over Ireland. The convention represented the 
public feeling of Ireland, as far as public oiDinioh ever can 
be represented by a delegated body. The descendants of 
the Cromwellian settlers of the north sat side by side with 
men of the rebel blood of Tipperary, with the impetuous 
people of the south, with the strong men of the midland 
hunting counties. The most remarkable feature of tlie 
meeting was the vast number of priests who were 
present. A great number of priests, young and old, 
spoke at the convention; all were warm in sympathy with 
the League and its leaders; all were ready to deal with the 
Bill as these leaders wished. Mr. Parnell explained his 
views to the convention. He announced that the League 
was willing to use the Bill as far as it went, but that the 
existence of the Bill did not put an end to the work of the 
Land League; it had still to be vigilant; it had to ex- 
periment upon the newly founded land courts with test 
cases, and in every way to watch over the interests of the 
tenant farmers. Not of the tenant farmers alone; the 
Irish laborers were to be thought of as well. The condi-. 
tion of the laborers in Ireland was very bad, and their 
complaints had gradually been taking organized shape. 
They were now formally recognized by the League, which 
became henceforward a Land and Labor League. The 
convention was smgularly quiet; the speeches were all 
moderate in tone; the attitude of the League as represented 
by its delegates was pacific and constitutional. But the 
country undoubtedly was in a disorganized state. The 
fierce anger that the Coercion Acts and their operation had 



EKGLAND UNDER GLADSTOKE. 153 

aroused was creating a widespread disorder, with which it 
seemed at first as if coercion itself could not successfully 
cope. The Land League leaders maintained always that 
they had the country entirely under their control, and that 
as long as they were to the front they could keep the dis- 
order and violence in check. How far they could have 
carried this out — ^how far they could have overmastered the 
forces that were now at work in Ireland — it is impossible to 
say, for they were not given the opportunity of carrying 
out their promises. 

The action of the Government during the couple of 
months following upon the rising of Parliament is wholly 
inexplicable. They can not have thought that the condi- 
tion of the country was dangerous, for they saw fit to set 
free Father Sheehy, a step which it is difiicult to believe 
they would have taken if they considered the country to be 
seriously disturbed. Yet, before the release of Father 
Sheehy, Mr. Parnell had received in Dublin the greatest 
tribute of popular enthusiasm that had been accorded to 
any Irish leader since the days of the Liberator. He had 
been attending meetings in the country. He returned to 
Dublin one' night toward the end of September. He was 
met at the station by an enthusiastic crowd bearing torches, 
and was drawn through the Dublin streets to the Land 
League offices in Sackvilie Street. From the windows of 
these rooms Mr. Parnell and Mr. Sexton delivered speeches 
to the vast, excited audience, who choked the whole of 
Sackvilie Street; and on the speeclies made that night 
part of the Government case was afterward made to rest. 
Yet it was after this demonstration and after those speeches 
that the Government thought proper to set Father Sheehy 
at liberty, although they must have known that he was 
scarcely likely to remain quieter after his experiences 6t a 
prison than he was before he entered it. Is it to be credit- 
ed that the Government considered the country to be seri- 
ously disorganized and disturbed, and yet deliberately let 
loose among such elements of revolution an agitator who 
was doubly popular, and therefore doubly dangerous, be- 
cause he was a priest, and was regarded by the people as a 
martyr? Father Sheehy at once commenced a vigorous 
crusade against the Government, and his entry into Cork, 
in company with Mr. Parnell, resembled a Roman triumph. 

For awhile after the session came to an end there appeared 



154 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

to be a lull in 2:)olitical excitement. The session had been 
so stormy that it was, not unnaturally, hoped that it might 
be succeeded by a lengthei:ked period of repose. One or 
two by-elections took jDlace, without any marked result 
upon the conditions of parties. Even political foes as well 
as friends were not displeased when Mr. James Lov/ther 
returned to the Parliamentary field as member for North 
Lincolnshire. His majority might be a matter for Liberal 
regret, for it ran to 471; but if a Tory were to be returned 
at all, why, then; Mr. James Lowther was not unwelcome. 
He had not been a very successful Chief Secretary for Ire- 
land under the late Government, because his genial in- 
difference to the cares of office, and light-hearted contempt 
for official routine, were not calculated to render him a 
shining success in perhaps the most difficult post in the 
Administration. But as a free-lance he was known to be 
excellent. His humor and his good-humor lent an air of 
piquancy to his most glaring schemes of obstruction which 
robbed them of half their horror, and his bitterest attacks 
upon his opponents were delivered with a school-boy hon- 
lioniie which prevented them from being offensive even 
w^hen they were most annoying. Few people seemed to en- 
joy the fun of political life more heartily thaji Mr. James 
Lowther, and for the sake of an assembly that wanted all 
the light-heartedness it could get, Mr. Lowther was wel- 
comed back to AYestminster. In North Durham Sir 
George Elliot was returned in the place of the late Colonel 
Joicey, a Liberal. Tn Cambridgeshire, Mr. J. E. Bulwer, 
Q. 0. , was elected without opposition in the room of Mr. 
Rod well, Q.C., who had resigned. In the county of 
Tyrone, in Ireland, there were three candidates in the field 
rendered vacant by the appointment of Mr. Litton to a land 
commissionership — Mr. Dickson, a Liberal, Colonel Knox, 
a Conservative, and Mr. Rylett, a Land League candidate. 
Mr. Dickson came to the head of the poll by a large 
majority. Mr. Dickson had been in Parliament before, 
bat had been thrown out at the General Election, which 
returned his son to Parliament with the proud distinction 
of being the youngest of its members. Mr. Dickson the 
younger had little more than barely come of age when he 
was returned to Parliament. 

On Monday, September 19, 1881, General Garfield, 
President of the United States, died. He had been fired 



Eiq-GLAND UKDER GLADSTOI^E. 155 

at some months before by a crazy assassin named Guiteau^ 
and had lingered for a long time, with varying hope of re- 
covery. The assassination of the Ozar Alexander II., in 
March, had caused great horror in England; the death of 
Garfield created a profound sense of regret. Seldom, per- 
haps, has the death of the chief magistrate of one country 
been recognized with so many public evidences of sympathy 
and sorrow in another country. On the day of the funeral 
many persons in London, who were not American citizens, 
wore some sign of mourning in their dress, and in all -the 
principal streets the shops displayed emblems of mourning. 
There was something especially tragic about the death of a 
brave soldier, an able man and statesman, by the hands of 
a semi-insane murderer, for whose crime no possible reason 
or shadow of a reason could be alleged. The murderer 
Guiteau was put on his trial. National patience has rarely 
been more sorely tested than that of the American public 
was, during the course of this protracted case, by the un- 
seemly conduct of the unhappy wretch who had fired the 
shot. The highest praise is but their due for the quiet 
patience with which they endured all, and gave the mur- 
derer every privilege that the law allowed him. Months 
after Garfield was in his grave the trial was concluded, and 
Guiteau was executed. 

Up to this time nothing new had taken place in Ire- 
land. The convention had been held, and had passed off 
quietly. Mr. Parnell had spoken in Cork and Dublin; 
the Land League was advising the tenant farmers to wait 
for the submitting of their cases to the land courts until 
the test cases of the League had been decided; the Land 
League itself was in full activity, and seemed more j)opular 
than ever. Suddenly a series of events took place with 
great rapidity, which were more startling in their character 
than anything that had preceded them. Early in October 
Mr. Gladstone entered upon what was called his Leeds cam- 
paign. It was, in point of fact, a campaign against the 
Irish Parliamentary party, and against Mr. Parnell in par- 
ticular. On Eriday, October 7, 1881, Mr. Gladstone was 
at Leeds receiving an address from the Mayor and town 
council, and he made a speech. This speech was remark- 
able for the manner in which it singled, out a political op- 
ponent for all the energy of Mr. Gladstone's powers of 
p-ttack. Mr. Gladstone began by replying to the OonsexTaj- 



156 ElS'GLAN'D UN^DER GLADSTONE. 

tive taunts over their victory at Durham. In Durham the 
victory had been won, it was said, by the Irish vote, and Mr. 
Gladstone at once turned to the Irish question. After de- 
claring that the condition of Ireland for generations, per- 
haps for centuries, its j^rosperity and happiness, or its loss 
of all rational hope of progress, depended upon its reception 
of the Land Act, Mr. Gladstone proceeded to draw a con- 
trast between the conduct of politicians of the school of 1848, 
like Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, and even of some advanced 
men of to-day like Mr. John Dillon, with the conduct of 
Mr. Parnell and his followers. Sir Charles Gavan Dulfy 
was delighted with the new legislation; Mr. John Dillon, 
rather than attempt to plunge his country into disorder by 
intercepting the operations of the Land Act, had with- 
drawn from politic?; while Mr. Parnell, in carrying out 
his policy of plunder, was doing his best to arrest its action. 
" Mr. Parnell,"" said Mr. Gladstone, slightly confusing his 
Scripture history in the vehemence of the moment, desired 
" to stand, as Moses stood, between the living and the 
dead, but to stand there not, as Moses stood, to arrest, but 
to spread the plague."" 

Such a speech, made at such a time, naturally created 
the greatest excitement. Lord Salisbury attended a meet- 
ing at Newcastle-on-Tyne on the following Tuesday, in 
which he pointed out humorously that Mr. Gladstone was 
unjust to Mr. Parnell: ^' When Mr. Gladstone comjolains 
that Mr; Parnell has deserted him, I think he forgets that 
it is mainly due to the organization over which Mr. Parnell 
presides that he is now Prime Minister of England. Mr. 
Gladstone's complaint of Mr. Parnell for preachhig the 
doctrine of public plunder seems to me a strange applica- 
tion of the old adage that Catiline should not censure 
Cethegus for treason."" In such terms the head of the Op- 
position bantered the head of the Government; but in Ire- 
land the speech aroused replies that had little spirit of 
banter in tliem. At a meeting in Wexford on the Sunday 
following Mr. Gladstone"s speech at Leeds, Mr. Parnell de- 
livered a speech of vehement attack upon the Prime Min- 
ister. It was a curious duel of words, unlike anythhig that 
English political life had been accustomed to; a Prime Min- 
ister leveling a bitter personal attack upon a political op- 
ponent, and the opponent retorting in terms of equal fierce- 
ness. Mr, John Dillon was not behindhand in replying to 



EN^GLAKD TJ^^DER GLADSTOKE.' 157 

the Prime Minister. Mr. Gladstone liad held him up as 
an honorable contrast to the conduct of Mr. Parnell^ and 
Mr. Dillon angrily and scornfully repudiated the compli- 
ments of the Prime Minister, lie had not, he assured the 
Prime Minister, retired from politics to allow free play to 
ihe Land Act. On the contrar}^ he deeply regretted that 
he had not been able to stand between his country and the 
Land Act altogether. 

Mr. Gladstone's speech had aroused the greatest excite- 
ment in Ireland, and, indeed, in England too. People felt 
that such a pronouncement could not have been uttered 
merely pour rive — that something more was to come of it; 
and something more came. A few days after Mr. Parnell 
and Mr. Dillon had replied to the attack, the Government 
replied by a veritable coup d^etat. A descent was made 
upon all the prominent Land League leaders in Dublin on 
Thursday, October 13. Mr. Parnell was arrested in Mor- 
rison's Hotel, and conveyed to Kilmainham early in the 
morning. Mr. Sexton, M.P., Mr. 0' Kelly, M.P., Mr. 
Dillon, M.P., Mr. O'Brien, and Mr. J. P. Quinn, secre- 
tary of the Land League, were arrested in rapid succession, 
and conveyed to Kilmainham Prison. Warrants were out 
for Mr. Biggar, Mr. Healy, and Mr. Arthur O'Connor. 
Mr. Biggar and Mr. Arthur O'Connor got over to Eng- 
land, where Mr. Healy was, and orders were conveyed to 
-them from their leader not to return to Ireland to certain 
arrest, but to remain in England, where they might be use- 
ful in keeping the agitation alive. 

These wholesale arrests startled the whole civilized world. 
Continental countries, used to struggles with revolutionary 
parties, congratulated themselves on the discovery that 
England, the proud mother of free nations, had her diffi- 
culties as well as they, and could only meet them with the 
old methods. In England itself the coup d'etat was re- 
ceived with satisfaction, almost with rejoicing, by the gen- 
erality of the supporters of the Government, though it is 
hardly necessary to say that advanced Eadicals like Mr. 
Jesse Collings, Mr. Thompson of Durham, Mr. Labou- 
chere, Mr. Storey, and Mr. Joseph Cowen, did not share in 
this satisfaction, and that the rejoicing was not unanimous 
even in the Cabinet. Mr. Gladstone was present at an en- 
tertainment given by the Corporation of the City of Lon- 
don at the Guildhall on October 13. Mr, Gladstone made 



158 EN^GLAKD UNDER GLADSTONE. 

a speech which might be regarded as the epilogue to his 
Leeds address. In the middle of an eloquent appeal to the 
principles of law and order the Prime Minister produced a 
telegram which he had just received, and in tones of tri- 
umphant exultation announced to his hearers the arrest of 
Mr. Parnell. The effect was curious. Had Mr. Gladstone 
informed his audience of the conquest of some foreign foe, 
of the successful conclusion of some long and hazardous 
war, or the consummation of some honorable and long- 
looked-f or peace, h's words could not have aroused a greater 
frenzj'' of enthusiasm. Every man in the crowded hall 
sprung to his feet and cheered till he could cheer no longer. 

Our enemies have fallen, have fallen,^' said Mr. Glad- 
stone; and the tumultuous applause with which he was 
greeted from political oj^ponents, as well as jDolitical allies, 
must have assured him that he had wrestled well, and over- 
thrown more than his enemies. 

Across the Irish Sea everything was confusion. Arrests 
followed arrests; excited meetings were held all over the 
country; a Ladies^ Land League, even a Children's Land 
League, and a Political Prisoners' Aid Society strove to 
keej) the agitation alive; there were slight riots here and. 
there; the Government took the most elaborate 'precautions 
against a possible popular rising. Suddenly the walls of 
Dublin were placarded by a proclamation calling upon the 
Irish j^eople to pay no rent while their leaders were in. 
prison. This document was signed by Charles S. Parnell^ 
President, Kilmainham Jail; A. J. Kettle, Honorary Secre- 
tary, Kilmainham Jail; Michael Davitt, Honorary Secre 
tary, Portland Prison; Thomas Brennan, Honorary Secre- 
tary, Kilmainham Jail; John Dillop, Head Organizer, 
Kilmainham Jail; Thomas Sexton, Head Organizer, Kil- 
mainham Jail; Patrick Egan, Treasurer, Paris. 

The No-Rent Manifesto was dramatically effective, but 
it was not generally acted upon; its framers can hardly 
have expected that it would be. The clergy were entirely 
against it. Even the most National of Irish ecclesiastics. 
Archbishop Croke of Cashel, condemned it unhesitatingly, 
A general strike of rent all over Ireland might have been a 
great political move if it had been possible, but it was not 
possible. The No-Rent Manifesto was a direct challenge 
to the Government, and the Government retaliated by de- 
claring the Land League an illegal body, by proclaiming 



EKGLAHD UKDER GLADSTONE* 159 

its meetings, and by arresting its remaining official, Mr. 
Dorris, and sending him to Dundalk Prison. Many 
women, members of the Ladies^ Land League, were put 
into prison in different parts of the country. The most 
advanced of the National newspapers, " United Ireland,'^ 
was shortly afterward proscribed, and for the time being 
practically suppressed. It carried on a fitful existence, 
printed now in Paris, now in Liverpool, and smuggled over 
as well- as might be to Ireland, where it was sold surrepti- 
tiously, and seized by the police whenever they could lay 
hands upon it. The Government had done their best to 
stifle the Land League, to crush it out of existence alto- 
gether, and they appeared to have succeeded. They really 
seemed to think that by abolishing an association and sup- 
pressing a newspaper they could silence a national agita- 
tion, and summarily dispose of a complicated and vexatious 
problem. 

As soon as Mr. Parnell was imprisoned the Lord Chan- 
cellor removed his name from the Commission of the Peace 
for the county of Wicklow. An effort was immediately 
made by the National section of the Dublin Corporation to 
confer the freedom of the city upon Mr. Parnell and Mr. 
Dillon. After a stormy discussion, in which Mr. Gray, 
M.P., and Mr. Dawson, M.P., led the National party, 
against Mr. Brooks, M.P., who opposed the proposal, the 
motion was lost by the casting vote of the Lord Mayor, Dr. 
Moyers. The proposal was only delayed. With the new 
year a new Lord Mayor was elected, Mr. Charles Dawson, 
M.P., a strong Nationalist- This time the National party 
in the Corporation were in a large majority, and by a large 
majority the customary vote of thanks to a retiring Lord 
Mayor was refused to Dr. Moyers for the part he had taken 
in defeating the freedom-of-the-city proposal. This pro- 
posal was now revived and carried successfully. Such an 
act on the part of the corporation of a city that had always 
been remarkable for what was called its " loyalty,^' which 
meant its subservience to Castle influence, was in itself 
deeply significant of the hold the National leaders had got 
upon the heart of the country. But a message from 
Heaven would not have appeared significant to Mr. Forster 
if it had not accorded with his pre-established opinions of 
the way Ireland ought to be governed. . 

The suppression of the Land League did not make Ire- 



160 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

land quiet. The imj^risonment of the responsible leaders 
of the National party had removed all check upon the 
fierce and dangerous forces which are always at work under 
the surface of Irish politics. The secret societies, which 
had almost ceased to operate during the rule of the Land 
League, came into play again the moment the restraining 
influence of a popular, constitutional, and open movement 
was removed. Outrages increased daily, and were exag- 
gerated out of all proportion to their increase, until, to 
those at a distance, Ireland appeared to be sinking into a 
condition of hopeless anarchy. The Chief Secretary had 
had his way; he had put into prison men, women, priests, 
according to his pleasure, and yet an obstinate island and 
an ungrateful people refused to justify him by being paci- 
fied. Order did not reign in Warsaw. 

The year 1881 was rich in its record of illustrious dead. 
On February 5 Thomas Carlyle quietly passed away, at the 
age of eight5^-five, in the little house in Cheyne Eow, Chel- 
sea, where he had lived the greater part of his troubled, 
laborious, unhappy life. How unhappy that life was, few 
of those who most admired Carlyle had any conception at 
the hour of his death. It was left to Mr. Froude to drag 
the miseries and meannesses of Carlyle^s private life into 
the cold, cruel light of publicity, and to drive for a time a 
disagreeable trade in the errors and the weaknesses of his 
dead friend and master. The reading world had long 
learned to look uj^on Carlyle as the preacher and expounder 
of grim, composed, almost Promethean resignation. 
" Argue not with the inexorable. "" That was the eternal 
text of Carlyle's homilies. " It is an everlasting duty, the 
duty of being brave."' " All things considered, what right 
hast thou even to be.^'' " m}^ brother, be not thou a 
quack. Die rather, if thou wilt take counsel; 'tis but 
dying once, and thou art quit of it forever." Carlyle' s 
writings are full of such maxims as these, counseling resigna- 
tion, renunciation, and that proud patience which the gods 
are said to love. Epicurus in his garden, " the halting 
slave who in Nicopolis taught Arrian, when Vespasian's 
brutal son cleared Eome of what most shamed him," the 
Emperor Stoic Aurelius, never counseled firm and unfail- 
ing fortitude more eloquently or more persistently than 
Carlyle. No maik was ever more scornful than he of the 
feebleness or the faint-heartedness of others. Thousands 



ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 161 

of human beings, since Carlyle began to write, must have 
found comfort, consolation, and courage in his heroic phi- 
losophy. It is difficult to imagine a troubled, world-wearied 
spirit not learning some lesson of true nobility, nor deriv- 
ing some fresh purpose for the fight of life, from the un- 
conquerable manhood of " Sartor Eesartus. ^^ Undoubtedly 
the feeling of the civilized world in the end of that first 
week in February was that a great and good philosopher 
had faded from the earth. Undoubtedly ever since that 
time the persistent and repeated efforts of the dead mas- 
ter's pupil have been to remove that impression, to teach 
the worshipers that their idol was not the least among the 
shams that he was always so bitter in assailing. In Oar- 
lyle's writings we find one man, in his life and letters we 
find another. Mr. Froude shows us a pitiful, querulous, 
feverishly impatient being, consumed and wasted by a de- 
vouring envy of all his intellectual peers and superiors, 
frietted by petty jealousies, mean hatreds, and morbid vani- 
ties. The words with which he has put on record his feel- 
ings toward his fellows eat like corrosive acid into their 
genius and their fame. He appears to have been almost 
incapable of an honest or honorable admiration for any- 
thing. The exquisite humor, the sweet and kindly spirit 
of Lamb stirred him only to a cankerous pity. " This is 
not a genius, '^ he snarls; '^it is sheer diluted insanity. 
Please take it away. ' ' The pure, star-like soul of Mill — of 
Mill to whom he owed so much — rouses only a malign envy 
and a malign contempt. '' Poor Mill!"' he says again and 
again scoflingly of the man who was in many things so 
immeasurably his superior. 

He seems, indeed, in all the hideous, dismal pages of 
his self -recorded life to have been animated by a malignant 
jealousy of others, which crippled within him the philoso- 
phy he preached so loudly for others. The s(Bva indignatio 
of Swift was at least directed against injustice, against un- 
truth, against oppression; the ^'fierce indignation'' of 
Oarlyle seems to have been directed against those who were 
successful, against those who had superior parts, against 
those who were more fortunate or more unfortunate than 
himself. He admires no one — except, indeed, here and 
there some member of the aristocracy, one of them a woman 
for whose sake he was quite willing to make his wife very 
miserable. The sidferings and misfortunes of others wake 



162 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

in him no gleams of pity; but his Stoicism only extends to 
the ills of others. The preacher of fortitude, of patience,, 
of endurance, complains with querulous iteration of the 
smallest personal discomfort. The least annoyance/ the 
minutest irregularity in the routine of his daily life, seems 
to have driven this last of the Stoics into a condition of 
impotent frenzy. The woman whom he married, and^ 
whom he succeeded in imbuing with something of his ownr 
scornful pity for every human being who was not Thomas 
Oarlyle, suffered terribly at his hands. On her own show- 
ing, on his own showing, he made her life a misery. 
Thackeray has drawn a powerful, terrible picture of Swift^,, 
''the lonely, guilty wretch, shuddering over the grave of 
his victim."^ The picture finds its parallel in Oarlyle ^s 
own agonies of pitiable remorse, in his wailings — occasion- 
ally in the Spanish language — over the life he had imbit- 
tered, and the devotion he had disregarded. 

It is difficult to see what purpose, not merely mercantile 
or merely cynical, was served by Mr. Froude^s publication 
of the letters and papers of Oarlyle and his wife. The 
familiar story of Socrates under the judgment of the physi- 
ognomist is indeed valuable. It is good to know that ia 
the nature of the best and wisest Athenian lurked fierce 
tendencies to crime and passion. It is good to know tliis, 
because it is good also to know that Socrates so conquered 
these evil inclinations that none of those about him suspect- 
ed their existence, and were for laughing the expounder of 
character to scorn until the conscious teacher checked 
them. But it is not easy to see what good service can be 
rendered to the world by making it clear that the stern 
Stoic, the lofty teacher, was after all only a " self -torturing- 
sophist,'' crammed to the lips with envy, malice, and all 
uncharitableness, the heedless, heartless tyrant of the 
Avoman who loved him, a man whose clamors for strong 
men and strong methods of government were only the 
utterances of a feeble nature, luirassed by dyspepsia. 

" Truth, though the sky fall,'' Mr. Froude might per- 
haps answer with his master. But how far is it truth? 
The confession of the repentant is often a darker record 
than the charge of the accuser. The business of the world 
was with Oarlyle the author, not with Oarlyle the heauton- 
timorumenos, not with Oarlyle the suffering invalid. It 
seems like treachery to take the world into such confidences. 



El^GLAKD UNDER GLADSTONE. 163 

They are sul) sigillo ; they are not fair evidence for or 
against. So long as the world remains imperfect, so long 
;as we do not live in a palace of truth, so long as men write 
to say of their fellows more than they exactly mean, and 
more than they would care to have repeated to the objects 
of their criticism, so long it will be unfair to judge a char- 
acter like Carlyle^s wholly by the records he may leave be- 
hind. Only wholly, however; partially he must be judged 
out of his own mouth; and to Mr. Froude, therefore, is 
due such credit as he may deserve for having successfully 
lowered the character of Oarlyle the writer of books by too 
comprehensive revelations about Carlyle the man. 

A thinker and teacher of a very different tyjDe from Oar- 
lyle died within the year. Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Dean 
of Westminster, was one of the most remarkable ecclesi- 
«astics that the Church of England in the nineteenth cent- 
ury had produced. Born in 1815, he was only sixty-six 
years old when he died; but those sixty-six years were years 
of unceasing activity, which put more of life into them 
than many men put into life-times extending far beyond 
the limitations of the Psalmist. Important as the part 
V7as which Dean Stanley played in the ecclesiastical history 
■of his time, he will perhaps be most remembered for the 
books with which he enriched the literature of his age. 
His poem on the '' Gypsies,''^ with which he won the New- 
digate prize in 1837, has indeed gone the way of most 
!Newdigate prizes, and been forgotten. But his '' Memorials 
of Oanterbury,^^ with its varied and glowing picture of the 
fortunes of the English metropolitan church; his ^' Sinai 
and Palestine,^ ^ which is perhaps the most fascinating of 
^ all records of Syrian travel; his picturesque, if somewhat 
f partial and one-sided, study of the " Eastern Ohurch,^^ 
and of the *' Jewish Ohurch '' — these will be remembered, 
these will form his fitting monument. 

Over in Ireland another great Churchman died — John 
McHale, Archbishop of Tuam, ninety years of age. The 
penal laws were in force during his childhood; he was 
seven 3^ears old when the rebellion of ^98 against those 
laws and the principles they represent broke out. Under 
those laws the future archbishop, the future scholar, re- 
ceived his earliest education, at those *' hedge schools '' 
which kept alive the light of learning and religion in Ire- 
land, in times most evil for the country and her faith. 



164 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

The old ecclesiastical sdiolarshijD for which Ireland was 
famous found its fitting modern representative in Arch- 
bishop McHale; while liis profound piety and saintly life 
would have done honor to the proudest epoch in the his- 
tory of the Church of the West. 

In the same year died George Borrow, the once famous 
author of the " Romany Eye '^ and of " Lavengro/^ The 
23resent generation had somewhat forgotten Borrow; he 
had fallen away from public attention, and chose to live a 
quiet and isolated, if not a lonely, life. But the news of 
his death came like a shock to many who perhaps, up to 
that moment, were hardly aware that he was alive. He 
has given somewhere a curious picture, in verse, of himself 
as a '^ man who twenty tongues can talk, and sixty miles 
a day can walk;^^ who, '' though averse to strife, could 
fight with pistol, sword, or knife,'' and who could " drink 
at a draught his quart of rum, and then be neither sick nor 
dumb. '" He was undoubtedly a man of many and varied 
gifts; he had lived through an adventurous and restless 
manhood into a long and quiet old age; and he faded out 
of a world in which his name had long been little more 
than a memory. Another life, no less restless aiid ad- 
venturous, ended in August, and removed one of the last 
of those who "once saw Shelley plain.'' Edward John 
Trelawney was one of the survivors of that matchless com- 
pany of men with whom it was his good-fortune to be in- 
timate, one of the last links that bound the 23resent genera- 
tion to the time of Byron and Shelley. Trelawney will, 
always be remembered as one of the few who performed 
Shelley's Roman rites by the shore of Spezia Bay, as one 
of the few who stood by the death-bed of Byron. Another 
wanderer, author, adventurer, who died this year, was 
Grenville Murray, once familiar in all men's mouths as 
the " Roving Englishman." He did a great many things 
very well, but nothing superlatively well. He wrote novels 
so very clever that they were sometimes mistaken for the 
works of greater men; he was a rattling, vivacious sj^ecial 
correspondent in days when special correspondence meant 
less than it means in the days of Archibald Forbes, of 
MacGahan, and Edmund 0' Donovan. He was a bright 
essayist, a good story-teller, an incomparable ^«?2eir?*. For 
many reasons he found it convenient to exile himself from 
England during the latter part of his life. His tastes and 



EKGLAND UNDEE GLADSTONE. 165 

sympathies were always much more Continental than 
insular, and he died, not inappropriately, in the city which 
he probably loved best of all cities, the city by the Seine. 
Among a crowd of others of less note may be mentioned 
John Hill Burton, the Scotch historian, the book-lover, 
the chronicler of the age of Anne; Mrs. S. 0. Hall, an 
authoress of some gentle and pleasant stories of Irish life; ■ 
Mrs. Ward, Nelson^ s adopted daughter, the " little Hora- 
tia"^ of his letters; James Spedding, the Baconian scholar 
and critic; Samuel Sharpe, the Egyptologist; William v 
Rathbone Greg, the essayist; Mr. Edward Miall, the Non- 
conformist, and E. A. Sothern, the actor, to be remem- 
bered in the annals of the stage as the inventor of Lord 
Dundreary. Out in Madras died Adam, former Liberal 
whip, and for a short time Commissioner of Works under 
the new Government. His health had been failing when 
he accepted the Governorship of Madras; the change of 
climate came too late to save him. He was more, perhaps,, 
sincerely regretted in the political world than is often the 
'lot of minor politicians. 

One young and promising career came to an mitimely 
conclu-sion in this year. Mr. Arthur CShaughnessy had 
early taken a prominent place among the constellation of 
young poets who gronped themselves around the central 
sun of Mr. Swinburne. He was an official of the British 
Museum, like Theophile Marzials and E. W. Gosse; like 
Russian Ralston and Assyrian Smith; like Mr. Richard 
Garnett, most erudite of librarians, most scholarly of 
critics, most graceful of translators. 



CHAPTER X. 

PAELIAMENTARY EEFOEM. 

The year 1882 opened with a grim sense of disquiet 
everywhere. In Ireland affairs were more disturbed thaii 
ever; Mr. Forster^s policy of imprisoning the Land League 
leaders had completely failed in restoring anything like 
order to the country, and the general sense of England 
seemed to consider that he had made a mistake. For the 
moment, however, a feeling of helpless despondency with 
regard to Ireland existed in England. The chief tojjic of 



IGG ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

p023iilar discussion was the proposed reform of the rules and 
regulations of debate in the House of Commons. Both the 
great political j^arties were agreed that some change was 
necessary, though they diilered as to the nature and degree 
of the 23roposed alterations. Naturally any suggestion or 
change in Parliamentar}'' institutions that had stood the test 
of centuries was in itseli a proposition of such magnitude 
as to cause uneasiness even in the minds of those who most 
advocated the necessity of some alteration. The speeches 
of public men,, the thoughts of private men, were chiefly 
occujDied by the condition of Ireland, and the talked-of 
changes in the Parliamentary machinery which had in some 
measure been the outcome of the Irish question. There 
was one other topic, too, on which men^s minds were agi- 
tated. Our relationshi23S with Egypt were becoming more 
complicated every day. 

Parliament met on February 7. The Queen^s speech 
began by announcing the intended marriage of Prince Leo- 
jDold, Duke of Albany, with the Princess Helen, of AValdeck 
and Pyrmont. The successful cession of Thessaly to the' 
Greek Government was next mentioned; the affairs of Egypt 
Were touched upon with no suggestion of alarm; the prog- 
ress of the proposed new commercial treaty with France 
was alluded to. The condition of Ireland was declared to 
show some signs of imj^rovement. Proposals were men- 
tioned for the establishment in the English and Welsh 
counties of the systems of local self-government which had 
been so long enjoyed by the towns; for the reform of the 
Corjioration of London; for the introduction of Bills deal- 
ing with bankruptcy, with corrupt practices at elections, 
the criminal code, the consolidation of the patent laws, and 
the conservancy of rivers. 

The Bradlaugh question immediately came up again 
with the meeting of the House. As soon as the new mem- 
bers who had' been elected during the recess had come for- 
ward and taken the oaths and their seats, Mr. Bradlaugh 
presented himself at the table, and demanded to be sworn 
m his turn. The resolution which had kept him from the 
precincts of the House being merely a sessional order, had 
no longer any force, and Mr. Bradlaugh was perfectly free 
to enter the Chamber. Sir Stafford Sorthcote immediate- 
ly rose and urged that the conditions of things were in no 
way altered, and he moved, in consequence, a resolution of 



e:n"gland under gladstoi^e. 107 

a very similar nature to that of AjDril 26tli of the preceding 
year. Sir William Harcourt, as the representative of the 
Government in the absence of Mr. Gladstone, moved the 
previous question, and supported his motion by arg-uing 
that the House had no power to alter the provisions of the 
statute under which Mr. Bradlaugli desired to be sworn, or 
to make any inquiry into the religious belief of duly elected 
members. Mr. Bradlaugli was then allowed once again to 
address the listening Commons from the bar. An orator 
of ability, pleading for a cause that had considerable j^ublic 
support, could hardly wish for a better rostrum than the 
bar of the House of Commons, or a more interesting au- 
dience than its medley of members. Mr. Bradlaugli, ad- 
dressing the attentive Commons, may have felt something 
of the emotions of Talma addressing his parterre of 
'*' princes orgulous. ^^ It was admitted, even by those who 
were most opposed to Mr. Bradlaugli, that in his difficult 
position he comported himself with dignity and with elo- 
quence; that, regarded simjDly as a j)iece of oratory, his 
defense of himself was worthy of the occasion. It was the 
more difficult for him to be at all impressive in his ajipeal, 
because it was not the first, nor even the second time that 
he had found himself there addressing the House of Com- 
mons from the Commons bar. The House of Commons 
does not love repetitions, and it is so much the more to 
Mr. Bradlaugh^s credit, artistically, that he was able to re- 
peat once and again his part of pleader for his rights be- 
fore the Commons without making his hearers either im- 
patient or indifferent. 

Mr. Bradlaugli urged that he had been misunderstood 
and misrepresented. If he were allowed to take the oath 
he should consider it as binding both upon his honor and 
liis conscience. But he warned the House that he was 
determined to present himself again and again to demand 
his rights, unless, indeed, the Government were prejoared 
to bring in some measure for the alteration of the existing 
law, in which case he would wait in patience till such law 
were passed. Mr, Gladstone, who had by this time come 
into the House, maintained his formerly exjiressed opinion 
that the matter was one with which the courts of law^ alone 
were properly competent . to deal. The previous question 
being negatived by 286 to 228, Mr. Bradlaugh again ad- 
vanced to the table. The Speaker ordered nini to withdraw. 



168 El^GLAN'D UKDER GLADSTONE. 

Mr. Bradlaugli declined. The Speaker appealed to the 
House. Sir Stafford Northcote moved that Mr. Bradlaugli 
be directed to withdraw. The motion was carried without 
a division, and Mr. Bradlaugli withdrew, under protest, to 
his familiar seat under the clock on the Liberal side, a 
seat which, being below the bar, and not therefore tech- 
nically in the House, he was at liberty to occujoy. 

He soon asserted his claim again. On February 21 his 
colleague in the representation of .Northampton, Mr. La- 
bouchere, moved for a new writ for Northampton. This 
was refused by the House by a large majority. No sooner 
was the division taken than Mr. Bradlaugli, who had been 
watching the ^proceedings, hurried up the floor of the 
House, stood before the table, and, taking from his pocket 
a NeAV Testament, proceeded in a loud tone of voice to 
swear himself in. The respectable inhabitants of Veii, 
who were assembled -in their temple on that auspicious day 
when the priest announced victory to him who should make 
the impending sacrifice, could hardly have been more sur- 
prised when Camillus made his sensation leap through the 
floor, and performed the rite, than were the assembled 
Commons at beholding Mr. Bradlaugli standing at the 
table and calmly administering the oath to himself. Stujie- ■ 
faction held them still, as Mr. Bradlaugli, having sworn 
himself in to his own satisfaction, produced a paper an- 
nouncing that he had duly taken the oath, signed this ' 
document and laid it gravely on the table. By this time 
the House had shaken off its stuj^or, and was howling and 
shouting with inarticulate rage as Mr. Bradlaugh took a 
seat with the calm aj^pearance of a man who had now suc- 
ceeded in satisfying all scrui^les and jDleasing all j)arties. 
Immediately a bewildering, confused debate s^irung up. 
Lord liandolph Churchill argued vehemently that the ex- 
traordinary action which the House had Just witnessed in 
itself vacated the seat. The law officers of the Crown dis- * 
agreed, and could not see their way to declaring that any 
statute had been broken. Lord Randolph Churchill then • 
asked if the insult to the House was to be j)assed over in 
silence; but, ujoon the counsel of Mr. Gladstone, the dis- 
cussion of the matter was postponed till the next day, , 
Wednesday, February 22. 

The next day, accordingly, the wrangle began again. 
After much expostulation on the part of the Ministry, who 



EKGLAl^D UNDER GLADSTONE. 169 

evidently did not know what to do, and mucli fierce invec- 
tive from the fierier Conservative spirits, Mr. Labouchere, 
by way of bringing everything to a genial termination, pro- 
posed that Mr. Bradlaiigh should be heard in his own de- 
fense. It may be that Mr. Bradlaugh thought he had now 
addressed the House sufficiently often from the bar of the 
House. It is certain that the repetition of such speeches 
from the bar could not but prove injurious to any cause 
and to any orator. Whatever may have been his reasons^ 
Mr. Bradlaugh was not going this time to keep within the 
old lines. He boldly entered the House, took a seat below 
the gangway, and argued with the Speaker his right to 
state his case from that position. This made the House 
more angry than ever. A stringent motion for exj^ulsion 
was at once brought forward by Sir Stafford Northcote, 
and carried by 297 to 80. Mr. Bradlaugh being thus form- 
ally expelled from the House, a new writ was immediately 
moved for, and granted without division. About the same 
time that Mr. Bradlaugh was thus being turned adrift from 
the Commons, the case of Clarke v. Bradlaugh was being 
argued over in the Court of Appeal, and the decision of 
the lower court, granting a new trial in Clarke v. Brad- 
laugh, was reversed. Mr. Bradlaugh once more came for- 
ward as a candidate for Northampton, and was once more 
triumphantly re-elected, defeating Mr. Corbett, who again 
opposed him, by a majority of 108 votes. 

Once more, therefore, the House of Commons and Mr. 
Bradlaugh were opposed. On March 6, Sir Stafford North- 
cote, determined to do his best to keep Mr. Bradlaugh out 
this time, moved a stern resolution that the House, having 
ascertained that Mr. Bradlaugh has been re-elected for 
Northampton, affirmed the sessional resolution of February 
7, and directed that he be not permitted to take the oath. 
To this Mr. Marjoribanks moved, as an amendment, a 
resolution urging a modification of the existing law, which 
would allow every elected member to take the oath or to 
affirm according to his option. This amendment was sup- 
ported by Mr. Gladstone, who considered Sir Stafford. 
Northcote^s resolution of too aggressive a character, and 
believed that legislation would relieve the House from a, 
painful position. The resolution, however, was carried by 
257 to 242; majority 15. The Government thereuj^on 
went through the now familiar performance of pretending 



170 EKGLAXD U:N"DER GLADSTO^nTE. 

to regard the leadership of the House in this matter as en- 
tirely in Sir Stafford Northcote's hands, and allowed it to 
be understood that they had no intention of bringing for- 
ward any legislation on the matter. They assumed, in 
fact, the attitude which of all others is perhaps the least 
becoming to a Government — that of the small boy who 
announces that he ^^ won't play any more," because he 
thinks he has been badly treated by his companions in the 
game. A sort of understanding, however, was arrived at 
with Mr. Bradlaugh himself, by virtue of which he was 
allowed a seat on one of the benches below the clock, on 
condition that he did nothing to disturb the House, and 
made no effort to share in its debates. 

Strife over the Bradlaugh question was not confined to 
the Commons alone. In the Upper House as well there 
"was wrangling, and ^oeer ojDposecl to peer on the great 
question of oath or no oath. Lord Redesdale began the 
w^ar by bringing in a Bill to exclude all atheists from Par- 
liament; but it was defeated, on its second reading, on 
March 23, by Lord Shaftesbury moving the previous ques- 
tion. For a w^hile the Government made no reply to this 
attack; but three months later, on July 4, the Duke of 
Argyll made an effort to solve the difficulty by bringing in 
an Affirmation Bill of his own, which was promptly thrown 
out, on Lord Carnarvon's motion, by 138 to 62. 

The Thanes were flying from Mr. Gladstone. One after 
another the old Whigs w^ere dropping from his standard, 
and either holding aloof or formally going over to the 
enemy. In 1881 Lord Zetland had formally seceded from 
the Liberal party, an insignificant herald of more significant 
secessions. Early in 1882 Lord Grey cut himself off from 
Liberalism, and w^ent over, with much pomp and solemnity, 
to the enemy. Lord Grey expressed himself as much 
alarmed by the harm Mr. Gladstone was doing to the land 
laws in Ireland, and was no doubt scheming to do to the 
land laws in England. He at least would not support 
Mr. Gladstone in a policy to which he no doubt thought — 
for he almost said so — that Lord Beaconsfield's exj^ression 
of " plundering and blundering " was singularly appropri- 
ate. "With Lord Zetland, Lord Grey refused '^^ to go on 
su2:>porting a man who, on every really imjDortant question, 
acts against the opinions of all the great Whig leaders in 
the old days, when the AVhigs were a party to which I, for 



Eiq-GLAND UKDER GLADSTONE. 171 

one^ was proud to belong, and of which I will not give up 
the traditions because a set of men choose to call them- 
selves the successors of a party with which th6y have really 
nothing in common/^ So wrote Lord Grey angrily to 
Colonel Dawnay, brother of the man who was just tibout to 
be returned for the North Riding by a comparatively small 
majority over Mr. Rowlandson, the representative of the 
Farmers^ Alliance. 

Nobody paid any great attention to Lord Grey^s retire- 
ment or to Lord Grey^s pronouncement. The days of the 
old Whigs, to which he so fondly alluded, were as much a ^ 
part of the past as the reigns and records of Egyptian 
Thothmes or Assyrian Assurbani-Pal. No human being 
was ever to be stirred again by any appeal to the venerable 
party cries and political watchwords which had done good 
service in the days when the house of Hanover was yet 
young in England, and WaljDole was setting an example to 
commoner Prime Ministers. Lord Grey was an eccentric 
statesman, who had long ceased to play any part of the 
least importance in politics. He was the son of that Lord 
Grey, the friend of Fox, the father-in-law of Lord Durham, 
who had been so much under the domination of his strenu- 
ous, great-hearted son-in-law. The present Lord Grey was 
determined not to understand that the world had advanced 
at all from the days of the first Reform Bill. He lived entire- 
ly among the traditions of the past, in that peaceful time 
before energetic Radicalism had reared its head high; he 
still fondly imagined the world to be in the Saturnian age 
of politics. He was out of tune with the modern mind, 
to whom the Whig is almost as much an anachronism as 
the mastodon, or the men in armor of a Lord Mayor's Show. 
He did not see that the strife henceforward was not between 
Whig and Tory, but between Tory and Radical; that the 
moderados of both parties, the Whig on the one hand and 
the Conservative on the other, were bound to disajDpear 
from the bustle and strife about them, and to take their 
proper place as the curiosities of a museum. 

On March 20, 1882, the debate on the proposed altera- 
tions of the new rules of Parliamentary debate may be said 
to have practically begun. The first resolution had actually 
been moved by Mr. Gladstone on February 20, and Mr. 
Marriot, Q.C., the Liberal member for Brighton, had 
brought forward his famous amendment; but the Brad- 



172 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

laugh episode, and the quarrel with the Lords, and the 
necessity of obtaining Supply, had intervened, and occui^ied 
Parliamentary time to the exclusion of other business for 
the sucgeeding month. 

The first rule gives the Speaker, or the chairman of a 
committee of the whole House, the i^ower of informing the 
House when he considers it to be the evident sense of the 
House, or of the committee, that the debate should close; 
whereupon a motion " that the question be now put " might 
be at once decided in the affirmative, if supported by more 
than two hundred members, or opposed by less than forty 
members, and suj^ported by more than one hundred mem- 
bers. The second rule restricts the making a motion for 
adjournment before the orders of the day or notices of mo- 
tion have been entered mto. The third limits the debate 
on such motions strictly to the matter of the motion; and 
prohibits any member speaking to such a motion from 
moving or seconding a similar motion during the same de- 
bate. The fourth rule allows the Speaker, before a dila- 
tory division, to call upon the members challengmg it to 
rise in their jolaces, and if they are less than twenty, to de- 
clare the determination of the House without a division. 
By the fifth rule the Speaker may call the attention of the 
House to continue(^ irrelevance, or tedious rej)etition on the 
23art of a member, and direct him to stop speakmg. The 
sixth decides that, in committee on a Bill, the j^reamble 
shall stand postponed without date until after the consid- 
eration of the clauses. The seventh allows the chairman of 
a committee, who has been ordered to make a rej^ort to the 
House, to leave the chair without the question being put. 
The eighth amended the half-past twelve o^clock rule of 
-February 18, 1879, by declaring that the rule should not 
5ipply to the motion for leave to bring in a Bill, nor to any 
Bill which has passed through committee. 1'he ninth gives 
the Speaker, after naming a member, the power of putting 
the question for his suspension without any debate, and rules 
that any member suspended under this order should be sus- 
pended on the first occasion for a week, on the second for a 
fortnight, and on the third for a month. The tenth allows 
the Speaker to put the question at once, whenever he con- 
siders any motion of adjournment to be made for the pur- 
pose of obstruction. The eleventh and twelfth provide for 
considering an amended Bill, and for going into Commit- 



EKGLAI^D UKDEE GLADSTONE. 173 

tee of Supply under certain conditions without putting any 
question. Then followed some rules empowering the forma- 
tion of two grand committees — one on law and jus.tice, 
^nd the other on trade^, shipping, and manufacture, to 
which Bills belonging to either of these divisions were to be 
committed. 

It was soon made evident that these innovations were not 
to be accepted without a severe and protracted struggle. 
JSTotices of amendments to all these various joroposals liter- 
ally were showered upon the order books. The amendment 
which was first considered, that of Mr. Marriott, was one 
of the most important, because it came from a supporter 
of tlie Government, and because it struck at once at the 
chief principle of the new proposals. Mr. Marriott^s 
amendment declared that no change in the rules of debate 
could be considered satisfactory which gave to a majority 
in the House of Commons the power of closing a debate. 
Mr. Marriott did not limit his censures to the proposals; he 
freely attacked the manner in which he considered that the 
proposals had been forced on the House by the machinery 
of the caucus, as applied by Mr. Chamberlain, and he vig- 
orously attacked the dangerous influence which, according 
to him, Mr. Chamberlain exerted in the Cabinet. This 
was the point at which the Government had arrived, when 
first Mr. Bradlaugh, then the Peers, and finally Supply, 
had interfered with its further progress. 

When the discussion on Mr. Marriotts amendment to 
the first of the procedure resolutions was resumed on March 
.20, Lord Hartington, as the spokesman of the Ministry, 
announced that the Government were determined to stand 
by the principle of closure by a bare majority. This prin- 
ciple was not merely obnoxious to the whole body of the 
Opposition; it was vigorously assailed from within the 
Liberal ranks. Mr. Marriott himself had declared his op- 
position by his amendment, while supporters of the Gov- 
ernment like Sir John Lubbock, and even Mr. Walter, 
were urgent in advising the Government to yield to some 
compromise, such as that of a two thirds majority. Eoi 
ten nights the debate on this question was carried on, in 
which both sides displayed an ingenuity of argument that 
was not a little bewildering to the unprejudiced student, 
whose opinions wavered one way as he heard Sir Michael 
Hicks-Beach point out -the horrors of the tyranny which 



174 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

the Government were about to impose upon a Oxice free 
Commons, and veered back in the other direction as he 
listened to Mr. Bright painting the reign of jDeace whicli 
would be sure to follow upon the successful adoption of the 
Ministerial projjosal. AVhen the division was taken ort 
March 30, the numbers stood 318 in favor of the Govern- 
ment to 279 against it — a decidedly larger majority than 
the Ministerialists had really ventured to hope for. When 
the rules had reached this point, the House adjourned for 
Easter, in the full confidence that the discussion would be 
soon resumed and soon finished. But it was decided by 
the destinies that, with the exception of a single discussion, 
on May 1, the new rules were not to be heard of again till 
the end of the session. 

Early in March Parliament was able to congratulate the 
Queen on her escape from the attack of a madman. The 
Ministerial proj)Osal to increase Prince LeopokVs allowance 
of £10,000 to £25,000 in view of his approaching marriage 
was carried on March 23, after some sharp Radical opposi- 
tion, by 387 to 42, the minority being the largest ever re- 
corded against a grant to a royal prince. On March 24 
the old S23irit of jorotection, which w^as deemed to have been 
exorcised and laid long ago, strove to rise from its grave 
and display itself in all its terrors to an undismayed 
majority. Mr. Eitchie, it is true, did not avowedly call 
himself a protectionist; he merely moved for a committee, 
in the interests of fair trade, to consider the operation of 
foreign tariffs on British commerce. But it needed a ver}?" 
slight display of the arguments of Mr. Ritchie and hi& 
supporters to show that new fair trade was indeed but old 
2:)rotection writ short. Sir Stafford ISTorthcote, it is true, 
who had once been looked upon as the stanchest Conserva- 
tive opponent of protection, and who had shown himself 
such on the protection motion of two years before, now de- 
clared himself ready to vote for Mr. Ritchie^s inquiry. In 
spite, however, of this example, only 89 members suj^jDorted 
Mr. Ritchie, as opposed to 140 who declined to have any 
dealings with protection, however cunningly disguised. 

Parliament reassembled on October 24 to discuss the 
rules of procedure. Lord Randolph Churchill immediately 
attacked the Government for departing from constitutional 
usage by assembling for the discussion of business after 
l^assing the Aj^j^ropriation Bill. The Appropriation Bill,. 



ENGLA]N^D UNDEK GLADSTOISTE. 175 

X/ord Randoljoli Cliurcliill urged^ was almost invariably 
kept for the last measure of a session^ in order to preserve 
the privileges of members after Supply had been closed. 
By abandoning this principle^ Lord Eandolph Churchill 
declared that the Government were putting the House at 
their mercy. Mr. Gladstone, in re|)ly, admitted that it 
was unusual for Parliament to reassemble after the passing 
of the Appropriation Bill, but that the course was not un- 
precedented; as in 1820, when Queen Caroline was tried, 
the House adjourned three times after passing the Ajjpro- 
priation Act, and transacted public business each time. 
vSir Stafford Northcote pointed out that the cases were not 
parallel, as the Government in 1820 only kept the House 
.sitting for the purpose of the Queen^s trial, and brought 
forward no business of their own. Lord Eandolj^h Church- 
ilFs motion for adjournment was defeated by 209 to 142. 

The debates on the Procedure Rules w^ere long, and it 
must be confessed wearisome. There was vigorous op|)o- 
sition offered to all the Ministerial proposals, but on the 
strength of its great majority the Government was unwill- 
ing to make many concessions, and in most cases carried 
its point triumphantly. The great battle of the protracted 
debates was fought on the question of closure by a majority 
pure and simple, or by a proportional majority of two 
thirds, or some other ingenious device. Compared with 
this question, in which the whole principle of closure w^as 
involved, all the other portions of the Ministerial proposals 
were comparatively unimportant, and on this question the 
opinion of the House was widely divided. The majority 
of the Conservative party, following Sir Stafford North- 
■cote^s lead, declared themselves opposed to the introduction 
of closure at all. Still, if closure they must have, let it be the 
]oroportional closure, as being on the whole less mischievous 
than the closure by a pure and simple majority. To this 
Lord Eandolph Churchill and the extremer members of the 
Tories below the gangway disagreed. Bad as closure was, 
proportional closure was worse. Closure by a bare majority 
would be more likely to bring the system into contemjDt 
than the more speciously fair seeming system of propor- 
tional closure. The vast majority of the Liberals were in 
favor of the absolute closure. The really advanced Ead- 
icals, as represented by Mr. Labouchere, wished to see 
closure frequently employed against even the formal and 



176 ENGLAi;rD UNDER GLADSTONE. 

recognized opposition. The ^^ democratic creed," as ex- 
pounded by Mr. Laboucliere, was " that there ought to be 
very frequent elections, say once every three years; that cer- 
tain measures ought to be presented to the people at these 
elections; that there should be a plebiscite with regard to 
them; and that if the people made up their minds that 
they should pass, the Ministry representing the majority 
having received an imj^erative mandate to carry them 
through, discussion was therefore useless." 

The Governn^nt received further the somewhat rare sup- 
port of the Irish members, who, as a party, voted for clos- 
ure pure and sim|)le, on the ground that the two-thirds 
scheme was aimed at the Irish party alone, while by the 
Government plan the measure would be meted out to the 
Opposition as well as to the Irish party. Mr. Gibson's two- 
thirds amendment was defeated by 322 to 238, a much 
larger majority than the supporters of the Government 
had ventured to hope for. The Opposition made various 
other attempts to amend and oj^pose the first rule, but the 
final division on it was taken on November 10, when by a 
majority of 44 — ^the numbers being 304 to 260 — the i^rin- 
ciple of closure familiar to Contmental parliaments was for 
the first time introduced into the procedure of the English 
House of Commons. The passing of the other rules was a 
mere matter of time. Six weeks after the House had met 
for its autumn session the new rules were finally disposed 
of, and had become a part of the institutions of Parliament. 
But tinkering of this kind was of very little use. The 
Parliamentary machine was well-nigh worn out. The con- 
duct of the Conservative opposition in 1884 made it quite 
clear that its antiquated forms and formalities had had their 
day, and were now only impediments to the progress of 
public business. 

A further effort to shorten the time devoted to public 
business was made by the creation of the two grand com- 
mittees, one to deal with Bills relating to law and justice, 
the other to consider measures relating to trade, shijiping, 
and manufactures. Each committee was to be composed 
of not more than eighty and not less than sixty members, 
twenty to form a quorum. Their sittings were to be pub- 
lic, and were not to be carried on while the House was not 
sitting unless by special order. These committees were 
empowered to consider all Bills intrusted to them, to de- 



EKGLAKD UKDEE GLADSTONE. 177 

bate upon and amend according to all the rules, of tlie 
House. Measures considered by them would be then sent 
to the House^ which had the power of rediscussing the 
whole measure point by point. It was, however, hoped 
that the House would not invariably make full use of this 
privilege, and that the grand committee would therefore 
materially facilitate business. The experiment was limited 
at first to one session; rooms were fitted up in the House 
for the reception of the new institutions. These rooms had 
all the appearance of mimic parliaments — toy parliaments, 
their opponents contemptuously called them — with their 
Ministerial and Opposition benches, or rather rows of 
chairs, their gangwa}^, and their table for chairman and 
clerks. 



CHAPTER XL 

IRELAND IN 1882. 

As far as the Commons were concerned, it seemed at 
first as if the session was not to be devoted to the Irish 
question so completely as the previous sessions had been. 
The Irish questions had, indeed, been discussed in the 
Lower House during the debate on the address. Mr. Gray 
had attacked the Government, for imprisoning the Irish 
leaders, and had moved unsuccessfully for a committee of 
inquiry. Mr. Justin McCarthy, as leader of the Irish party 
in the absence of Mr. Parnell, had arraigned the Irish 
policy of Mr. Forster, and the Chief Secretary had made 
his defense. Mr. P. J. Smyth, an Irishman of the '48 
school, who was as unpopular now in Ireland as he had' 
been in England in his younger days, moved an amend- 
ment of his own, supporting a restoration of the Irish Par- 
liament, and had been defeated after offering to withdrav\r 
his amendment. Mr. James Lowther, delighted to find 
himself once more in Parliament, and happier in opposition 
than in office, had made a rattling attack upon Mr. Glad- 
stone and the Ministry generally, accusing them of making 
use of agitation and of outrage for the purpose of coercing 
Parliament. The Irish members had called upon Mr. 
Gladstone to explain his speech upon Mr. Smyth's amend- 
ment, in which he had uttered some words which had seemed 
to indicate sympathy with the demand for Home Rule. 



17S EJS'GLAND UXDER GLADSTONE. 

Mr. Gladstone had replied that he had always been of opin- 
ion that a demand from -Ireland for some form of local 
government was not too dangerous to be considered, but 
that u}) to this time no case, projoerly formulating the Irish 
claim, and including needful ^precautions for the preserva- 
■ lion of the sujoremacy of the British Crown, had been -pre- 
sented. But all these various discussions of the various 
points of the Irish question had j^assed over without much 
difficulty, and for a moment it seemed as if Ireland were 
not to be the all-engrossing tojDic of the session, when sud- 
denly, from the quarter where it might least have been 
€X23ected, "the whole question was raised anew and with 
aggravated intensity. This new quarter was the House of 
Xiords. 

On Friday, February 17, Lord Donoughmore moved for 
a select committee to inquire into the working of the Land 
Act. The step was undoubtedly extraordinary and unusual. 
The Land Act had only been some four months in actual 
working ojDeration, and here was a proposition gravely made 
among the peers to inquire into its workings and reopen 
the whole land question and perhaps the land agitation 
again; The Government fought desperately agaijist the 
l^roposal, but wholly in vain. Many of the peers had re- 
gretted bitterly the way in which they had been forced to 
acce2)t the Land Act; many, perhaps, fancied that, after 
all, if they had stood out firmly at the time, they might 
have successfully rejected the Bill, and possibly destroyed 
the Ministry. They saw now that the Ministry was em- 
barrassed; they believed that it was unpoj^ular; time and 
the hour seemed ripe for their revenge. The landlord 
party, always strong in the House of Lords, denounced the 
jDartiality of the new land commissioners aud sub-commis- 
sioners. They attacked Mr. Gladstone for his observa- 
tions about Home Eule, in which they detected darksome 
schemes for the entire destruction of landlordism in Ire- 
land. But most of all, perhaps, they dwelt upon a certain 
pamphlet which had just been issued with the official ap- 
proval of the Irish Land Commission. This j^amphlet 
which had for title ^^ How to become Owner of your own 
Farm; why Irish Landlords should Sell, and Irish Tenants 
should Purchase; and how they can do it under the Land 
Act of 1881," consisted of a rejDrint of a series of articles 
wiiich had appeared in the ^* Freeman's Journal." The 



ENGLAND UNDEE GLADSTONE. l?^' 

pamphlet was written by Mr. George Fottrell, a Dublin, 
solicitor of position, who had been appointed secretary to- 
the Irish Land Commission. It skillfully and strenuously 
defended peasant proprietorship; described the Land 
League as '^'^the most widespread, the most powerful, and 
in its elfects, w^e believe, the most enduring organization of 
our time;" and sjooke of the cause for which '^Parnell and 
Dillon and Davitt labored and suffered."^ This was one 
of the pieces of ill-luck that had pursued the Government 
ever since they had taken oifice. No blame was attachable^ 
to Mr. Fottrell. He had written to the ^^ Freeman" his. 
opinions on the land question; he had thought that their 
republication would be of service to the Land Commission^ 
by making its powers and its purpose more easily intelli- 
gible to landlord and to tenant; he was a well to-do-man, 
who had nothing to gain by his secretaryship to the Commis- 
sion, which he immediately resigned as soon as the pam- 
phlet became a cause of quarrel and was withdrawn from 
official circulation. But the pamphlet, of course advocating 
extreme views, commending an organization that the au- 
thorities had suppressed as illegal, and praising men whc 
were at that moment in prison by order of the executive, 
gave the Lords an 0|)portunity of attacking the Govern- 
ment, of which they gladly made use. Lord Donough- 
morels motion was carried by 96 to 53, no less than twelve 
Liberal Peers voting in the majority. 

The Government met this challenge, which was prac- 
tically a recantation of the consent of the Lords to the 
Land Act, and a direct censure upon the Ministry, by re- 
fusing to recognize the committee, or have an5rthing to dc 
with it. Unabashed and undismayed, the Peers went on. 
Lord Donoughmore moved the appointment of his com- 
mittee, consisting of fourteen peers, a few of whom were 
Liberal in name, like Lord Dunraven and Lord Brabourne. 
Lord Salisbury sounded some notes of defiance against the 
Ministry; Lord Granville protested futilely, and the com- 
mission was appointed without a division. The Prime 
Minister answered defiantly this defiance from the Upper 
House. He at once moved what was practically a vote of 
censure on the Lords for their conduct. He brought for- 
ward, on February 27, a resolution showing that any Par- 
liamentary inquiry into the working of the Land Act at so 
early a period of its career must be injurious to its success- 



ISO ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTOXE. 

f ul action, and to the administration of government in Ire- 
land. The debate lasted for several nights, dnring which 
varions hoj^es of a compromise of some kind were frequent- 
ly raised, to be as frequently destroyed. Finally, on 
March 9, Mr. Gladstone's resolution was carried by 303 to. 
235. 

In the meantime the condition of Ireland was in no 
wise improving. Mr. Forster had been intrusted with tre- 
mendous powers; he had imprisoned men by hundreds; he 
was practically as much the master of Ireland as Mouravieff 
was of Lithuania, and yet it was being admitted on all 
sides that he had wholly failed to pacify the country. 
AVhen he had first asked for coercive j)owers he had dis- 
tinctly led the House and the country to understand that 
he knew exactly the men who were causing the agitation, 
and who ought to be arrested, and he left the logical in- 
ference to be understood that, these men once arrested, 
agitation would of necessity cease. Agitation had not 
ceased. There were 918 arrests under the Coercion Acts 
up to April 18; there were over 600 men in prison, includ- 
ing the Parliamentary leaders of the Land League, and 
yet the country was more dangerously disturbed than ever. 
While the Land League existed, and was drawing into its 
open agitation all the discontent of the countiy, the secret 
societies had practically ceased to exist. The moment the 
open agitation was j)ut down by the strong hand of the 
Government, that moment the secret societies found new 
strength, and began to thrive and flourish. The horrors 
and terrors of the days of the tithe war were revived again. 
From all sides arose a demand for some alteration in the 
treatment of Ireland. The advanced Kadicals called for 
a marked change in the Irish executive; the Liberals, who 
did not go so far as this, felt that the Forster j^olicy could 
be 25ursued no longer. The Conservatives themselves be- 
came impressed with the real magnitude and imi^ortance of 
the Irish question, and were j^i'epared to make concessions 
to Irish demands. 

Mr. W. H. Smith brought forward a proposal for a large 
establishment of peasant projorietors in Ireland, which was 
a practical development of Mr. Bright's theories on the 
subject, and a great advance upon the i3ur chase clauses of 
the Land Act of 1870. Lord Salisbury gave his coidial 
sup23ort to Mr. AV. H. Smith's j^roposals. At a meeting in 



EI^GLAlsTD UNDEE GLADSTOJ^E. 181 

Liverpool on April 12 , Lord Salisbury declared that it was 
necessary to alter the Land Act^and that the alterations could 
only take place in a forward direction. Lord Salisbury 
saved himself from any accusation of change of ground with 
great skill. " I am not one of those/^he said^ '^ who believe 
that after a revolutionary step you can go back. It is one 
of the curses of revolution that it separates you by a chasm 
from the past which you have left — a chasm which you can 
never recross."^ But he went on to say that the only hope 
of establishing peace and contentment in Ireland lay in the 
effort to bring the ownership of the land back again into 
single hands. The utterances of the Conservative chief 
were repeated in all directions by the Conservative clansmen^ 
and the Government soon found themselves in the awkward 
position of either having their hand forced, or being out- 
bid by their political opponents. 

On April 20 a sharp debate sprung up in the House on 
the conduct of an Irish resident magistrate, Mr. Clifford 
Lloyd, one of Mr. Forster^s favorite subordinates in the 
carrying out of the Coercion Acts. Mr. Clifford Lloyd 
was special magistrate at Clare. He was perhaps the most 
unpopular magistrate in Ireland, where he was as disturb- 
ing an element as he has since proved in EgyjDt. As it 
was believed that his life might be endangered, every pre- 
caution was taken to afford him protection. All ordinary 
precautions of course it was the duty of Mr. Clifford Llo3'd 
and of the police under him to provide, but in one instance 
a subordinate took extraordinary precautions. A circular 
was issued by the county inspector of Clare to the sub- 
inspectors under his command, warning them to be on the 
alert to prevent any attempt to assassinate Mr. Clifford 
Lloyd: ^^ Men proceeding on his escort should be men of 
great determination as well as steadiness, and even on sus- 
l^icion of an attempt should at once use their fire-arms, to 
prevent the bare possibility of an attem23t on that gentle- 
man^s life.^^ This marvelous document concluded by 
assuring those to whom it was addressed that ^'^if men 
should accidentally commit an error in shooting any person 
on suspicion of that person being about to commit mur- 
der, ^^ this county inspector was prepared to '^'^ exonerate 
them by coming forward and producing the document. " 
]S'ow this document was, on the face of it, wholly illegal. 
There is notliing whatever in the British constitution which 



18:^ EXGL^IND UN^DER GLADSTOJ^E. 

allows any one, even a connty inspector of police, to exon- 
erate any one else from the responsibility of killing an in- 
nocent person. The law does not recognize the capacity 
of one citizen to take upon himself the responsibility for 
another citizen ^s act of murder or of manslaughter. But, 
apart from the gross illegality of the circular, it was a ter- 
rible document to issue at such a time. An armed police- 
man, primed by the perusal of such a circular, would not 
be likely to reflect very j)rofoundly upon its legality, would 
not be likely to waste much time in considering whether, 
after all, his superior officer had the j^ower of exonerating 
him from any of the effects of his own rashness. 

In the excited condition that the disturbed districts of 
Ireland were then in, a policeman might fancy he dis- 
cerned signs of an intent to murder in any wayside beggar 
or worker hi the fields, or peaceful j^edestrian, and 02)en 
fire upon him without hesitation, confident of comjDlete 
absolution at the hands of his county inspector for any un- 
fortunate mistake. Of course the executive could not tol- 
erate such a circular. It was shown that the insj^ector 
issuing it was an excitable man, who lost his head in the 
presence of danger. The debate got mixed up with other 
questions as to the right to erect Land League huts for 
evicted tenants, but the circular itself was kept steadily in 
view throughout the debate, and was condemned on all 
sides. During the debate, one statement was made which 
deserves quotation as throwing a curious light ui^on the 
manner in which Mr. Forster conducted his government of 
Ireland. Mr. Eedmond, member for 'New Eoss, had said 
that Mr. Forster was in the habit of consulting Mr. Shaw, 
member for Cork county, upon his coercive policy; a little 
later Mr. O^Connor Power rose and commented upon this 
statement. "I also,'^ said Mr. O'Connor Power, ''have 
been reputed to share the distinguished honor of the polit- 
ical confidences of the right honorable gentleman." In 
order to appreciate the full importance of Mr. Power's suc- 
ceeding remarks, it is necessary to have clearly before 
one's mind the exact position both of Mr. Shaw and Mr. 
O'Connor Power. Mr. Shaw was a conspicuously moderate 
man. He had lost the leadership of the Irish Parliament- 
ary party because of his studied moderation; he had been 
opposed in the county he represented by a Land League 
candidate; he was a man of means, of 230sition; his good 



EKGLAKD UNDEE GLADSTONE. 183 

sense and shrewd ability had often won him warm Minis- 
terial praises; he was a strong Liberal, and a stanch sup- 
porter of the Government. When the Irish extremists 
sat in opposition, he remained resolutely in his old seat 
below the gangway on the Opposition Liberal side. Here 
was a man whom one would have thought a Chief Secre- 
i;ary for Ireland would be glad to consult with. 

Mr. ^Connor Power was a man also of great ability, 
who had begun his political career as a man of extreme 
National views, but who had been gradually outstrijoped in 
extreme opinions by others, until he now ranked ^s a mod- 
erate Home Euler. He was very unpopular with the Land 
League; he was very popular with the Liberal party, to 
vv^hom his really remarkable gift of eloquence had been 
more than once of signal service. He, too, might be taken, 
like Mr. Shaw, as representing the opinions and expressing 
the demands of the really moderate men of Ireland. They 
were the Gironde, they were something less than the 
Gironde, of Irish discontent. If England was to pay any 
attention at all to any Irish claims or any Irish grievances, 
these were the very men whom one would imagine the head 
of an Irish executive most anxious to consult, and most 
eager to understand. Yet, ^^ I am able to say,^^ said Mr. 
O^Connor Power, '' on behalf of the honorable member for 
•Cork County, Mr. Shaw, as well as for myself, that the 
right honorable gentleman, the Chief Secretary for Ireland, 
has not thought either of us worthy of being consulted. 
ISTor, indeed, has the right honorable gentleman taken into 
his confidence a single representative of Ireland with re- 
gard to his Irish policy. ^^ Mr. O'Connor Power further 
related a conversation he had had with a member of the 
House, who had been returned by a large Irish constitu- 
ency as an avowed supporter of the Liberal Government, 
and said that the member had assured him that Mr. Fors- 
ter had never asked him a single question about the Gov- 
ernment of Ireland since he had taken his seat on the front 
Government bench. Any comment upon such conduct on 
the part of a Chief Secretary trying to deal with an agi- 
tated country would be indeed superfluous. The dry 
statement is in itself as cutting as the keenest satire or the 
bitterest condemnation. 

The case of Major Traill was very different. Major 
Traill was a resident magistrate in Mayo. It was unfortu- 



184 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

nate that the career of the most consi^icuous of the resident 
magistrates engaged in carrying out the Coercion Act was 
not altogether irreproachable. Major Traill had been cap- 
tain in the first battalion of the 19th Foot, and while in 
that capacity had been reprimanded by the general com- 
manding the brigade at Aldershot in the presence of his 
brother officers, and. his commanding officer had, in conse- 
quence, represented the desirability of his removal from 
his battalion. He afterward retired from the army, and 
received the honorary rank of -major on being a23pointed 
to his resident magistracy by the late Government. Major 
Trkill had the rej^utation of being a somewhat eccentric 
magistrate, and it was said of him that on one occasion he 
drove into the town of Claremorris, and threatened to ar- 
rest his shoe-maker under the Coercion Act, because he had 
not mended a pair of his old shoes. But he was deter- 
mined to preserve his own life, and to teach others to do 
the same, taking for his text the legal words, " No punish- 
ment or forfeiture shall be incurred by any jDcrson Avho 
shall kill another by misfortune, or in his own defense, or 
in any other manner without felony.^-' In accordance 
with this princij^le. Major Traill always went about with 
a guard of two policemen, one armed with a Winchester 
repeating rifle, carrying twelve rounds ready and fifteen 
rounds in reserve; the other provided with a double-bar- 
reled gun loaded with buckshot, and carrying eight rounds 
in reserve. He himself carried a revolver and six extra 
cartridges, and his groom was similarly armed. " The 
man who attempts my life," Major Traill wrote in the 
letter which described his precautions, '' and lives to be 
tried by a jury, is entitled to their merciful consideration 
as a brave man. " Against any such precautions as these 
there was nothing to be said. A man had a j^erfect right 
to defend himself thoroughly against attempts at assassi- 
nation, and to be at all times prepared to make any would- 
be assassin pay dearly for his attempt. But the circular 
w^hich had been issued with regard to the safety of Major 
Clifford Lloyd was of a wholly different nature. 

In the meantime Mr. Parnell had occu2:>ied himself in 
his prison by drafting a Bill to meet the difficulty of the 
arrears of rent under which the tenant farmers were 
weighed down. This Bill was sent out of Kilmainham to 
the Irish Parliamentary party, and was put into the hand? 



Eiq"GLAKD UNDEE GLADSTOI^E. 185 

x)i Mr. Eedmond. It proposed to relieve distressed tenants 
of all arrears of rent up to the time of the passing of the 
Land Act^, in August, 1881, and to apply the funds of the 
Irish Church to the payment. This Bill was brought for- 
ward in the House, and was favorably criticised by the 
Prime Minister. He did not, indeed, accept the measure 
as it stood, but he hailed it as an expression of the desire 
of the Irish party to make the Land Act effectual, and he 
allowed it to be understood that if the Irish party con- 
sented to withdraw the measure — which, of course, they 
had not the slightest chance of passing unassisted — the 
Government would see its way to introduce a measure of 
some similar purport to deal with the question of arrears. 
This announcement on the part of the Government was 
only the herald to a series of more surprising concessions. 
It was on the face of it inconsistent that the Government 
should be accepting with approval Irish schemes of legis- 
lation whose authors were at the time in prison. It soon 
became rumored abroad that the Irish policy of the Gov- 
ernment was about to undergo a radical change; that there 
were great dissensions in the Cabinet in consequence, and 
that strange things might be looked for. The strange 
things came to pass. 

Undoubtedly the Government were very much embar- 
rassed by their position. They could not keep some 
hundreds of ^'^ suspects ^^ perpetually in prison; neither 
could they hold Mr. Parnell, Mr. Dillon, and Mr. O'K^lly 
always in Kilmainham. Private overtures of liberation 
had been made indeed to the three imprisoned members of 
Parliament on the part of the executive on condition of their 
leaving the country for a time. The offer was refused, 
and was renewed in another form. The im23risoned mem- 
bers were offered liberty if they would even consent to leave 
the country for a very short term — if they would only cross 
the water to France, free to return when they pleased. 
The prisoners steadily refused these offers. They had been 
unfairly imprisoned, they considered, and they would come 
out under no compromise. Early in A|)ril it suddenly be- 
came known throughout Ireland that Mr. Parnell had been 
released, and every village in Leinster, Connaught, and 
Munster blazed into bonfires at the news, only to flicker 
down again when it became known that the release was 
merely temporary — a liberation on parole to allow Mr. 



186 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

Parnell to go to Paris for a few days to attend the funeral 
of a relative. Mr. Parnell was bound by the terms of tli& 
parole to take no ^^olitical action of any kind during his 
brief period of liberty, and of course the engagement was 
strictly observed. There was a faint feeling, half hope, half 
fear among some of the Castle clique in Dublhi that Mr. 
Parnell would not return to Kilmamham; but any such 
feeling was quieted by Mr. Parnell 's return to his 23rison on. 
April 24. It was felt pretty general^, however, that this 
temi^orary release was only the herald of final freedom, and 
this feeling was confirmed by the reception Mr. Gladstone- 
accorded to the Irish Arrears Bill. 

On Monday, May 1, the first definite sign that something 
had taken place Avas given by Lord Salisbury in a question,- 
or rather a string of questions, which he addressed to Lord 
Granville ui the House of Lords. Lord Salisbury sought 
some explanation of " the prodigies which have appeared 
in the political sky.^^ In other words, he wished to know 
if it was true that the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Earl 
Cowper, had resigned; that Lord Spencer had taken his 
place; and that there was a change of policy indicated bj 
the change of officers. Lord Granville declined to rej^ly to= 
the questions till the next day. On May 2, therefore. Lord 
Salisbury repeated his questions, and then Lord Granville 
made his answer. The answer was full of surprises. Lord 
Granville announced that Lord Cowper had resigned — had,, 
in fact, done so some weeks previously, but had left it to the 
option of the Prime Minister when the resignation shoidd 
take effect. Lord Spencer was apjoointed iii his stead. 
Furthermore — and this was the most important and the 
most surj)rising part of the answer — the Government had 
made up their minds to liberate the three imprisoned mem- 
bers, and to examine into the cases of other sus2:>ects. 
Finally, the Government intended legislation on the ar- 
rears question and on the '^ Bright clauses " of the Land 
Act. 

In the House of Commons the same day, Mr. Gladstone 
made a similar statement. Seldom in the history of Par- 
liament, seldom certainly in our own time, has a Ministerial 
declaration so important and so unexpected been given 
from the Treasury bench. Perhaps the nearest parallel we 
can find to it is when Sir Robert Peel aimounced that his 
Government had abandoned the princij^les of protection^ 



EKGLAN"D UNDEE GLADSTOlS^^E. 187 

tand come round to the views of the Anti-Corn Law League. 
The news was certainly of a nature calculated to take away 
the breath of those unprepared for it. Ever since their ac- 
'Cession to power, the Government had been j)^^rsuing a 
certain line of policy with respect to Ireland. Suddenly,, 
after having carried that policy out in the most extreme 
jnanner, the Government changed its front without warn- 
ing, and inaugurated a diametrically opposite line of policy. 
Under such conditions Mr. Forster^s resignation was in- 
evitable. The Ministerial change was in effect, though un- 
avowedly, a direct and severe censure upon his hopeless 
iailure to deal with the Irish difficulty, and a direct admis- 
sion on the part of his chief of the incapacity of the 
subordinate. Mr. Forster had, of course, failed hopelessly. 
How hopelessly he had failed was not known then, nor for 
nearly a year later. We know now that the result of his 
extraordinary policy was to increase instead of diminishing 
agitation and disaffection in Ireland. While he was proudly 
hoasting that he had all th.e discontented and danger- 
ous in prison, safe under lock and key, the real danger ex- 
isted unknown to him, striking at his own life. While he 
^vas confident that he had manufactured a peace upon the 
method of Agricola, he only escaped from the blows of as- 
isassins, of whose existence he was helj^lessly ignorant, by a 
series of chances which can be called little less than mi- 
Taculous. ' , 

Ireland has had in her time a series of Chief Secretaries 
of many kinds and various abilities; but it may fairly be 
said that she never had any one so incajDable of attaining 
even a dim and shadowy understanding of the conditions 
of the problem with which he had to deal as Mr. Forster. 
It might Well be written of him, in paraphrase of what was 
once written of Lord Eldon, that it had been given to no 
human being to do so much good in Ireland as he had pre- 
vented. It has been happily said that, under the new 
Government, Ireland had suffered from three things — 
famine, the House of Lords, and the administration of Mr. 
Forster. Of the three, the last was the worst, for famine 
could not be more blind <nor the House of Lords more prej- 
udiced than Mr. Forster. It is easy to understand, it is 
even easy to pity Mr. Forster^s position. He had gone 
over to Ireland convinced that the Irish question had been 
reserved for him and him alone to settle; that the hour 



Ib8 ENGLAXD UXDEli GLADSTOJS^E. 

had brought the man. He believed that he would be re- 
ceived with joy by a grateful peoj^le, that he would return 
in triumph, a sort of new and vastly superior Cicero, to 
teJl his country that there had been an Irish question. 
^When he found that the difficulties of centuries w^ere not 
to be removed by a wave of his hand, he lost his temper 
and his head. He became hopelessly entangled in the 
meshes of the Castle nets; he learned to see only with Cas- 
tle eyes, and hear only with Castle ears. The position of 
Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant is at all times 
thankless enough; to succeed in it is almost an impossibil- 
ity; not to fail altogether requires infinite patience, infinite 
moderation. Mr. Forster had no patience and no modera- 
tion. When he found that everything would not go at 
once as smoothly as he wished, he tried to force it his own 
way. Alexander, unable to disentangle the Gordian knot, 
and cutting it with his sword, has remained to all time a 
satire upon petulant impatience. But Ireland was not the 
knot of Gordius, and Mr. Forster was not Alexander. His 
methods, alike of repression and conciliation, were clumsy^ 
capricious, almost ludicrous, had not their effects been so 
disastrous. 

The surprises were not quite over. On May 4 Mr. 
Cowen asked Sir William Harcourt if the Government 
were willing to order the release of Mr. Michael Davitt. 
The Home Secretary answered that the Government had 
decided to release Mr. Michael Davitt unconditionally. A 
little later the same day Sir Henry Wolff asked a ques- 
tion which was the ominous herald of many a long and 
weary wrangle. He wished to know whether the releases 
were made in consequence of any assurance received by the 
Government from the leaders of the Land League that the 
" No-Rent " circular would be withdrawn. In reference to 
the long and vexed question which arose out of tliis matter, 
it should be borne in mind that Mr. Gladstone, in his state- 
ment of May 2, had said that the measures of the Govern- 
ment had been taken by them on their own responsibility 
entirely, " after gathering all the information which it was 
in their power to extract, either through the medium of 
debate in this House, or by availing themselves of such 
communications as were tendered to them by Irish repre- 
sentatives;^^ and was " an act done without any negotia- 
tion, promise, or engagement whatsoever. " Now, in answer 



ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 189 

to Sir Henry Wolff ^s question, Mr. Gladstone said, '^ The 
intentions which are entertained in regard to the ' No-Rent ^ 
circular, which are important, form a portion of the subject 
to which I have already alluded when I stated that her 
Majesty^s Government had received information tendered 
to them which they deemed to be of great importance^ 
which justified and mainly prompted their conduct in the 
matter of the recent releases. '^ Sir Henry Wolff, seeming 
to consider the reply unsatisfactory, announced that he 
w^ould repeat his question in the next week. 

The moment he had sat down, Mr. John Dillon, who had 
just come across from Ireland, from prison, rose and asked 
the Prime Minister if he meant to say that any information 
had been sent to him from him (John Dillon) with reference 
to the *^^ No-Rent"' manifesto. Mr. Gladstone had not 
heard Mr. Dillon's name used in any information that had 
been conveyed to him on the subject. Mr. O'Kelly imme- 
diately rose, and repeated Mr. Dillon's question, applying* 
it to himself, and was immediately followed by Mr. Sexton„ 
who, as another signatory to the "^ No-Rent " manifesto 
wished also to know if his name had been mentioned to the 
Prime Minister. As these members rose one after another to 
question the Prime Minister thus, the House became pain- 
fully excited. Something was evidently coming; what 
revelations would now take place? Mr. Gladstone, with an 
appearance of surprise, answered that no name of any of 
the members who had just spoken had been separately 
mentioned to him, but that -he was bound to say that he 
had heard statements which appeared to him to include 
them. In a House more excited than ever, but holding 
its breath to lose nothing of what might be forthcoming, 
Mr. Dillon rose to assure the Prime Minister and the 
country that if his name was included it was without his 
authority, knowledge, or consent. Mr. O'Kelly made the 
same statement; Mr. Sexton, too, disclaimed it. Sir 
Michael Hicks-Beach immediately rose, and put the wonder 
and curiosity of the House into spoken words, asking the 
Prime Minister from whom he had received the statements. 
Mr. Gladstone replied slowly that he had received state- 
ments from members of that House, one of whom was not 
in his place, whose duty it was to consider when or whether 
they should make an explanation on the subject to the 
House. For himself, he stood ^by his statement that the 



190 ENGLAN'D UNDER GLADSTONE. 

Croveniment had had information voluntarily tendered to 
them Avith regard to the intentions of the Irish meml^ers, 
on which they had acted. Several other questions were at 
once showered ujion the Prime Minister, hut he declined to 
make any further answer until the members resi^onsible 
for tlie communication upon which the Government had 
:acted should have made wdiatever explanation they thought 
fit to the House. 

A few minutes later Mr. Forster rose to make his per- 
sonal ex23lanation of his resignation. In a speech which 
seemed studiously contrived, under the appearance of can- 
dor and rugged honesty, to injure as much as possible the 
Oovernment he had left, Mr. Forster defended his present 
position and his past career. He had advocated the im- 
2n'isonment of the three members; he was now oj^posed to 
their liberation. They had been arrested, not merely be- 
cause they were obstructing the carr5dng out of the Land 
Act, but because they were trying to carry out their un- 
ivritten law to a degree that would have left the Govern- 
ment a sham, and made Mr. Parnell in reality what he was 
called by many of his friends, the uncrowned king of Ire- 
land. To the late Chief Secretary's mind there were three 
con^litions in virtue of which he would have consented to 
the liberation of the imprisoned members, but to his mind 
not one of these three conditions had been fulfilled. There 
should have been a j^ublic promise on their j^art ; or Ireland 
•quiet; or the acquisition of fresh powers by the Government. 
Had the three members jDromised to make no further at- 
tempt to set up their will against the law of the land, he 
would have taken their word. '^ The honorable, member 
for Cork knows how I differ from him; he knows what a 
wonder and surprise it is to me that he can bring himself 
to do what he has done; but he is not only a gentleman in 
.station, he is a man of honor, and I would have taken his 
word. '' This condition had not been obtained., nor was 
Ireland quiet. Its condition was better than it had been. 
The Land League had been defeated, Boycotting checked, 
outrages had, on the whole, diminished. Still the battle 
of law against lawlessness had not been won, and there 
never was a time, in Mr. Forster^'s opinion, in which it was 
more dangerous to relax the authority of the law. The 
third condition — the passing of a fresh Act — was, indeed, 
in the mind of the Government, but it was to be postj^oned. 



Eiq^GLAKD UNDEE GLADSTONE. 191 

until the passing of the Procedure Rules^ instead of takings 
as it sliQuld^ precedence of all other measures. 

So far Mr. Forster^ who sat down amid enthusiastic Con- 
servative cheers. He was immediately followed by Mr. 
Gladstone. He was evidently strongly impressed with the 
painful nature of the situation, and of the difSculty in 
which Mr. Forster^s well-planned attack had placed him. 
After paying an eloquent tribute to the services and ability 
of his late Chief Secretary, the Prime Minister regretted 
that he should have allowed himself to charge the Govern- 
ment with giving Procedure precedence of all other ques- 
tions, indifferent as to the grave condition of Ireland. He- 
proceeded to parry with great skill the strokes of his late 
colleague. He fully admitted his resjoonsibility for the- 
liberation, as for the arrest, of Mr. Parnell and his friends. 
But he refused to admit that he or the Government had 
any right to question Mr. Parnell and his companions for 
any avowal of change in their views. That would be some- 
thing like, m effect; asking for a penitential confession. 
^^ I am not the man to go to any member of the House and 
ask him for a statement involving his own humiliation. '^ 
To Mr. Forster^s appeal to the Government not to buy 
obedience to the law by paying any black-mail of concession,, 
the Prime Minister replied by assuring the House there 
w^as no arrangement between the Government and Mr. 
Parnell. ^^ There is no bargain, no arrangement, no 
negotiations; for nothing has been asked, and nothing has; 
been taken. " The promised Arrears Bill had nothing to 
do with the release of Mr. Parnell. When it had been 
promised, the Government had not received the informa- 
tion which had since come to their knowledge. '^ We re- 
ceived information upon evidence which we knew to be 
most trustworthy. . . . Was it possible for Ministers of 
the Crown, possessed of such information in regard to per- 
sons whose honor we have no title to dispute, to treat it as 
if it had never reached them, and to continue them in their 
confinement?^^ 

Mr. Parnell then rose to assure the House that in any 
communications, verbal or written, to his friends on the 
state of Ireland, which may have come to the attention 
of the Government, the question of his own release or the. 
release of his colleagues had never been entered into. He 
had, however, both said and written that a settlement of 



792 Ei;rGLAND UN"DER GLADSTONE. 

the arrears would have an enormous effect in the restora- 
tion of law and order in Ireland. He was followed by 
Mr. Dillon and Mr. O^Kelly^ who disclaimed having made 
any suggestion of any sort for release, or any conditions 
of any kind with the Government. Then Sir Stafford 
Korthcote moved the adjournment of the House to discuss 
the situation, and a lengthy debate sprung up, in which 
the Conservatives bitterly attacked the Government, whose 
conduct was defended by Sir William Harcourt and Lord 
Hartington. 



CHAPTER Xn. 

THE SIXTH OF MAY. 

For the first time since the Liberal Government had 
taken office the aspect of Irish affairs was really hopeful. 
The misunderstanding between the Liberal party and the 
Irish party, which had grown wider and more imbittered 
during the past two years, seemed to have passed away for 
good. The Government appeared to have at last resolved 
to act upon Fox^s princij^le of governing Ireland according 
to Irish ideas; it looked as if a golden age had actually 
arrived in Irish politics. Then came the terrible tragedy 
which suddenly shattered all those fair hopes, and made the 
dark history darker just at the moment when men were 
fondly fancying that the iieAv era had begun. 

On Saturday, May 6, Lord Frederick Cavendish arrived 
in Dublin. He came out, full of hoj)e, to deal with the 
difficult problem, under the new and better conditions that 
now ap2:)eared to govern it. He took part in the procession 
which attended the entry of the new Viceroy, Lord Spencer. 
It was said at the time, that at one point in the journey to 
the Castle a man, out of the crowd that filled the streets, 
came to the carriage in which Lord Frederick Cavenaish 
was seated, and asked which was the new Chief Secretary; 
and that. Lord Frederick answering, the man looked at 
him long and curiously, and then disappeared into the 
crowd. Afterward, it Avas thought that this incident, if it 
ever took jDlace, had something to do with the dismal story 
— a belief in the end disproved, when it became known 
that the murder of Lord Frederick was unintentional. 
When the inaugural ceremony was over. Lord Frederick 



ENGLAKD UKDEE GLADSTONE. 193 

Ciavendisli walked toward the residence appointed for him 
in the Phoenix Park. On the road he was overtaken by 
Mr. BiirkC;, a Ciistle official of long standing and of great 
unpopularity. Mr. Burke stopped his car, got otf, sent 
the car away^ and, joining Lord Frederick Cavendish, 
walked with him through the long, broad road that leads 
through the park past the viceregal lodge. It was a bright, 
beautiful, summer evening; the time was between seven 
and eight, and the light was scarcely less clear than at 
noonday. The park was not lonely or deserted; there were 
many people in it enjoying the fine summer evening. What 
happened would seem to be impossible were it not too ter- 
ribly true. On the wide highway of the park, with grass- 
grown spaces at each side, with trees, indeed, here and 
there, but none in such number as to in any place darken 
or cover the spot; in the vivid light of a May evening, with 
many people about, these two men were killed, almost cut 
to pieces, by a band of armed assassins. Some men on 
bicycles, who were riding through the park, passed Lord 
Frederick Cavendish and Mr. Burke walking together 
within a few yards of the Phoenix monument. The bicy- 
clists went round the monument; coming back, they met an 
outside car with four men on it, driving rapidly away. A 
little further on they found two bodies lying on the 
ground, covered with wounds and soaking in blood. From 
the windows of the viceregal lodge, which lies to the right 
of the road. Lord Spencer himself and his friends had been 
looking out. They had seen some sort of scuffle going on 
in the road some hundreds of yards away, and had thought, 
nnconcernedly, that they were looking at some rough 
horse-play.. A man who was walking with his dogs, at 
some little distance from the scene of the murder, beheld 
what he, too, thought was rough horse-jDlay, saw two men 
fall to the ground, and the rest drive away, without .any 
thought that he was witnessing a terrible murder. The 
assassins themselves had made their escape. The car and 
its occupants had driven rapidly oif in the direction of 
Chapelizod, the Dublin suburb that takes its name from 
that Belle Isoud, who was daughter of the fabulous King 
Anguish, of Ireland — a monarch most appropriately 
named. The seemed to have wholly disappeared; dark- 
ness, apparently, had swallowed them up forever from the 
eyes of men. 

7 



194 Eiq'GLAND UI^DER GLADSTO]S"E. 

It would be difficult to exaggerate the horror that fell 
ii])on England on that Sunday morning in May when the 
news was known. The crime was without a parallel in the 
recent history of England and Ireland; it was as unexpect- 
ed as it was terrible. The manner in which the murder 
was done, with knives — and the knife was hitherto almost 
unknown in all cases of outrage in Ireland — the escape, 
the absolute disappearance of the assassins, the moment 
chosen for the crime, at a time when the hostility of two 
years seemed at an end, the fact that the chief victim was 
the herald of the new policy of peace — all these things, 
combined to make the deed of especial blackness. It 
should never be forgotten that at a time when England 
and all the world were thrilled with horror at the murder,. 
at a time when the passions of the coolest men might well 
be stirred to their worst, the tone of English opinion and 
of the English press was, with rare exceptions. Just and 
moderate. No howl of hate was raised; no wild cry for 
indiscriminate revenge. In the face of the awful catastro- 
phe the English leaders and the English people were able 
to govern their anger, and to meet the situation with hon- 
orable dignity and composure. 

The three chief Irish leaders — Mr. Parnell, Mr. Davitt, 
and Mr. Dillon — held a hurried meeting together. Mr. 
Davitt had come out of Portland Prison the previous night, 
had iDeen welcomed joyously by his friends; but all joy in 
his release faded before the news of the murder. He and 
his two friends j^repared a hurried address to the Irisli 
people, expressing in their own heart-stricken grief the 
sorrow and shame of the party and the people they rej^re- 
sented. The document concluded, " We feel that no act- 
has been perpetrated in our country during the exciting 
struggles for social and political rights of the past fifty 
years that has so stained the name of hospitable Ireland as 
this cowardly and unprovoked assassination of a friendly 
stranger; and that until the murderers of Lord Fi-ederick 
Cavendish and Mr. Burke are brought to justice, that stain 
will sully our country's name.'' At meetings all over the 
country the crime was no less bitterly denounced. A 
meeting in Cork, composed chiefly of Nationalists and Land 
Leaguers, passed unanimously a resolution declaring, 
" that this meeting of the citizens of Cork, spontaneously 
assembled, hastens to express the feelings of indignation 



E:N'G[LAND UN^DER GLADSTOis"E. 195 

and sorroAV witli which it has learned of the murders of 
iord Frederick Cavendish and Mr. T. H. Burke last night; 
to denounce it as a crime that calls to Heaven for venge- 
ance; to repudiate its authors^ whoever they may be, with 
•disgust and abhorrence, as men with whom the Irish nation 
has no community of feeling, and to convey our condolence 
with the families of the murdered.'' The Corporation of 
Dublin passed a resolution declaring that, until the perpe- 
trators of the crime were brought to justice, all Irishmen 
must feel dishonored. Eesolutions of kindred nature were 
passed in all parts of Ireland, and the deepest sorrow and 
indignation appeared to prevail throughout the country; 
hut no trace of the assassins was discoverable. Many 
.-arrests were made, but nothing could be proved against the 
men arrested. Some few madmen, in different parts of 
the world, accused themselves of the crime, as is always the 
case when any such crime is committed, and were found, 
on investigation, to be insane. For a time it seemed as if 
-the authors of the crime had succeeded in hiding them- 
.selves forever from the pursuit of law. 
' The Government at once decided to abandon, for the 
moment, the Procedure question, and to bring forward 
Bills for amending and extending both the Land and the 
Coercion Acts of the previous session. All this was re- 
solved at a hurried Cabinet Council called on the Sunday 
succeeding to the murder. A new Chief Secretary, too, 
v^^as to be appointed. The names of Mr. Chamberlain and 
;Sir Charles Dilke at once occurred to many minds. It was 
generally believed that either of them would have accepted 
the offer of the post without the slightest hesitation, in spite 
of the terrible fate of Lord Frederick Cavendish; but 
neither Mr. Chamberlain nor Sir Charles Dilke would ac- 
cept the position of Chief Secretary unless the post was ac- 
companied with the privilege of a seat in the Cabinet. It 
is in the highest degree probable that the appointment of 
cither of these statesmen might, at that critical point in 
Irish affairs, have been productive of great good. Both 
were men of wide and profound political knowledge; both 
were distinctly in advance of the conventionalities of party 
politics; both were known to have great sympathy with the 
grievances of Ireland. The Government, however, did not 
see their way to appointing either of the only two men who 
'.could possibly have been able to deal with the Irish ques- 



19 G ENGLAND UKDER GLADSTONE. 

tioii in a spirit of broad and compreliensive statesmanship. 
It is, of course, possible that the conditions of the place are 
too severe for any ability; it is jDOssible that either Mr. 
Chamberlain or Sir Charles Dilke would have injured in 
vain a brilliant reputation and marred a distinguished 
career by the effort to manage the affairs of Ireland from 
within the walls of Dublin Castle. It is difficult to im- 
agine either Mr. Chamberlain or Sir Charles Dilke submit- 
ting tamely to the sordid routine and stubborn officialdom 
of Dublin Castle. It is easier to believe that the Castle 
clique would have found a master, and not a servant, a 
rod, and not a tool. The Government, however, was de- 
termined not to allow a seat in the Cabinet to go with the 
Irish secretaryship, and the post was given to Mr. George 
Otto Trevelyan. 

Mr. George Otto Trevelyan^s career is a curious example 
of the infatuation with which the passion for political life 
can inspire its victims. Mr. Trevelyan was a clever man 
in a variety of ways; but he ways, beyond and above all, a 
really brilliant man of letters He had written very few 
books; but among that few some were certainly among the 
best that his time had produced. His " Cawnpore ^' is an 
honorable example of beautiful English prose worthily ap- 
jDlied. Seldom has a sad and simple story of suffering and 
heroic deeds found fairer interj^retation. The record of 
that desperate siege, of the courageous defense, of the fatal 
catastrophe, and of the bloody, swift revenge, reads with 
something of the strength of an Homeric rhapsody, with 
something of the vivid genius which records the taking of 
the Bastile. Yet '' Cawnpore " must rank second t6 
*' The Early Years of Charles James Fox.'" In those 
joages the wild youth, who was to be one of England's 
greatest statesmen, lives again. He is as real there as 
Harry Esmond, or George Warrington, or Sydney Carton; 
as truthful as any last-century chronicle written in the acid 
speech of a Hervey or the courtly slanders of a Chester- 
field. All the last century lives in those delightful pages, 
hi which the author seems to have inherited his nucleus 
marvelous prose, and to have adopted the kindly, loving 
keenness of insight with which Thackeray gazed upon the 
dim and faded canvases of last-century heroes and beauties 
and statesmen. It is deeply to be regretted that the early 
life alone of Fox is told. The gain to English literature. 



EKGLAND UKDEE GLADSTONE. 197 

would "have been great, indeed;, "had Mr. Trevelyan con- 
sented to carry that resplendent career, from its wild Tory 
boyhood, through those years of a statesmanship in advance 
of its epoch, into the grave over which Freedom might well 
have wept! But we are given to understand that the un- 
finished window in Aladdin ^s palace is destined to remain 
unfinished. Mr. Trevelyan, uniting the rare qualifications 
of being a man of fortune and a man of genius, chooses 
rather a life of Parliamentary drudgery and narrow official 
distinction to the honor of being one of the foremost 
authors of his time. He prefers that, instead of teaching 
men to say of him, " He wrote the Life of Fox,^^ they shall 
say instead, " He served without much notice in Parlia- 
ment for many years, and filled some small offices un- 
worthy of his name, in order that he might become an 
unsuccessful Irish secretary, and walk the streets of Dublin 
or of London with an armed detective at his heels. " 

Other Ministerial changes took place, Mr. Leonard 
Courtney was given Lord Frederick Cavendishes Financial 
Secretaryship of the Treasury; Mr. Campbell Bannerman 
went from the War Office to the Admiralty, and was suc- 
ceeded by Sir Arthur Hayter. Mr. Courtney^s Under- 
Secretaryship of the Colonies was taken by Mr. Evelyn 
Ashley, whose place at the Board of Trade was given to 
Mr. J. Holms, while Mr. Herbert Gladstone and Mr. E. 
W. Duff were advanced to Treasury vacancies. Later on 
Mr. Gladstone resigned the Chancellorship of the Exchequer 
to Mr. Childers. Lord Hartington came to the War 
Office. Lord Kimberley took the India Office. Lord 
Derby became Colonial Secretary. Sir Charles Dilke en- 
tered the Cabinet as President of the Local Government 
Board in the place of Mr. Dodson, who became Chancellor 
of the Duchy of Lancaster on the resignation of Mr. Bright. 

Parliament met on May 8, to pay tribute of regret to the 
memories of Lord Frederick Cavendish and Mr. Burke. 
Lord Granville spoke in the Upper and Mr. Gladstone in 
the Lower House. Mr. Parnell expressed, on the part of 
his friends, and on the part, as he believed, of every Irish-, 
man, in whatever part of the world he might live, his un- 
qualified detestation of the horrible crime which had just 
been committed in Ireland. He wished to state his convic- 
tion that the crime had been committed by men who abso- 
lutely-detested the cause with which he was associated, and 



198 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

Avho devised and carried out the crime as the deadliest 
blow which they had it in their power to deal against the 
hopes of the Irish party^ in connection with the new course 
on which the Government had entered. 

The House met on May 11 at nine in the evening, after 
the funeral of Lord Frederick Cavendish had taken place 
at Chatsworth. The first reading of the new Prevention 
of Crime Bill was at once introduced by Sir William Har- 
court. The new measure contained some startling pro- 
posals. To meet the difficulty of punishing crime caused 
by the hitimidation of jurors, who might be afraid to re- 
turn, at the peril of their lives, a condemnatory verdict, it 
was proposed that where the Lord Lieutenant was of opin- 
ion that a just and impartial trial could not be had of per- 
sons charged with treason, murder, and crimes of exagger- 
ated violence, he might appoint a Special Commission, 
consisting of three judges of the Supreme Court. This 
court would sit without a jury, and decide the questions of 
law and fact, and their judgment would have to be unani- 
mous. To meet some ot the objections that would be raised 
against such an unusual tribunal, an appeal was to be 
allowed in all cases tried before such a court to the Court 
of Criminal Cases Eeserved, in which a quorum of five 
judges decided cases brought before them by a majority. 
The second part of the Bill gave the police power, in pro- 
claimed districts, to search houses by day or night for the 
secret apparatus of crimes. Another clause provided for 
the arrest of persons found prowling about at night and 
unable to give a pro23er account of themselves. To meet 
the importation of crime from abroad, it was decided to 
revive the Alien Act, giving power to arrest and to remove 
from the country foreigners who might be considered dan- 
gerous to the public peace. All kinds of intimidation 
would be summarily punished; the Government would be 
empowered to seize all newspapers inciting to crime; and 
the Lord Lieutenant was given special powers to deal with 
unlawful assemblies by a Court of Summary Jurisdiction, 
consisting of two resident magistrates. The duration of the 
Act was to be for three years. The measure was received 
with something like enthusiasm by the majority of the 
House, only one English member, Mr. Joseph Cowen, 
speaking against it. Mr. Parnell expressed his deep regret 
^hat the Government should have found it necessary to in- 



ENGLAND UKDER GLADSTONE. 199 

troduce such a measure^, wliicli could only result in more 
disastrous failure than the failure of the previous coercive 
policy. 'On a division the Bill was read for the first time 
by 327 to 22, only two English members, Mr. Joseph 
Oowen and Mr. J. C. Thompson, of Durham, voting in 
the minority. Opposition to certain portions of the Bill 
came from a more unexpected quarter than that of the 
Irish members. The Irish judicial bench publicly pro- 
claimed their unwillingness to accept the new duties which 
the Government Bill would have put upon them. So grave 
a change in the principles of the administration of justice 
was most unwelcome to the majority of the Irish judges: 
and one of them in especial. Justice Fitzgerald, was con- 
spicuous for the opposition he offered to the Ministerial 
proposal. 

Before the new Coercion Bill was brought forward for 
its second reading, the question of the negotiations between 
the Government and the imprisoned Irish members came; 
up again, negotiations which about this time received the 
name of the " Treaty of Kilmainham."^ On May 15, Mr. 
Puleston asked the Prime Minister if he would produce the 
documentary evidence of the intentions of the recently im- 
prisoned members of Parliament with reference to their 
conduct if released from custody. Mr. Gladstone declined, 
on the ground that the production of the letters which had. 
passed between certain members of the House might tend 
to diminish the responsibility of Her Majesty^s Govern- 
ment. The moment Mr, Gladstone had finished si^eaking, 
Mr. Parnell rose and offered to read the letter which he 
understood to be the documentary evidence alluded to. 
The letter, which was dated from Kilmainham on April 
2S, 1882, was addressed to Captain O^Shea, member for 
Clare, and ran as follows: 

" I was very sorry that you had left Albert Mansions be- 
fore I reached London from Eltham, as I had wished to 
tell you that after our conversation I had made up my 
mind that it would be proper for me to put Mr. McCarthy 
in possession of the views which I had previously com- 
municated to you. I desire to impress upon you the abso- 
lute necessity of a settlement of the arrears question, which 
will leave no recurring sore connected with it behind, and 
which will enable us to show the smaller tenantry that 
they have been treated with justice and some generosity.. 



:^00 ENGLAND UXDEK GLADSTONE. 

Tlie proposal 3'ou have described to me, as suggested in 
some quarters^, of making a loan over however many years 
the payment might be sj^read, should be absolutely reject- 
ed,, for reasons which I have already fully explained to you. 
If the arrears question be settled upon the line indicated by 
lis, I have every confidence — a confidence shared by my 
colleagues — that the exertions which we should be able to 
make, strenuously and unremittingly, would be effective in 
'Stopping outrages and intimidations of all kinds. As re- 
gards permanent legislation of an ameliorating character, 
. 1 may say that the views which you always shared with me 
as to the admission of lease-holders to the fair-rent clauses 
of the Act are more confirmed than ever. So long as the 
flower of the Irish peasantry are kept outside the Act 
there can not be the permanent settlement of the Land 
Act which we all so much desire. I should also stron^lv 
hope that some compromise might be arrived at this session 
with regard to the amendment of the tenure clauses of the 
Land Act. It is unnecessary for me to dwell upon the 
enormous advantages to be derived from the full extension 
of the purchase clauses, which now seem practically to 
have been adopted by all parties. The accomplishment of 
the programme I have sketched out to you would, in my 
judgment, be regarded by the country as a practical settle- 
ment of the land question, and I believe that the Govern- 
ment at the end of this session would, from the state of the 
country, feel themselves thoroughly justified in dispensing 
with further coercive measures. " 

Mr. Parnell read this letter, not from the original, but 
from a copy furnished by Cajotain O^Shea, who had mis- 
quoted the last paragraph. Mr. Forster immediately called 
attention to the misquotation, and put into the hands of 
Captain O'Shea a copy of the letter, in which the conclud- 
ing paragraph ran thus: " The accomplishment of the 
programme I have sketched out to you would, in my judg- 
ment, be regarded by the country as a practical settlement 
of the land question, and would, I feel sure, enable us to 
co-operate cordially for the future with the Liberal party 
in forwarding Liberal principles; and I believe that the 
Government at the end of the session would, from the state 
of the country, feel themselves thoroughly justified in dis- 
]X'nsing with future coercive measures. " For the moment 
tlie matter droi^joed; but the same evening Captain O^Shea, 



ENGLAND UN^DER GLADSTOis"E. 201 

speaking on the first reading of the Arrears of Rent (Ire- 
land) Bill^ made an explanation of the negotiations, and 
the part he had played in them. In considering the condi- 
tion of Ireland in April, Captain O^'Shea had come to the 
conclusion that the country was in a state most conducive 
to the proposal of a truce, and to the ultimate hope of a. 
permanent peace. He accordingly wrote to the Prime 
Minister, offering to submit to him a statement on Irisli 
aifairs as they appeared to him. While he was waiting for 
a reply, Mr. Parnell, who was out of prison on parole,, 
called upon him on April 11. The two conversed on Irish, 
questions, and Mr. Parnell appeared anxious that Captain. 
O^Shea should exert all his influence with the Government 
to get the question of arrears practically adjusted. Cap- 
tain O^Shea then asked whether, in the event of the arrears 
question being satisfactorily settled, Mr. Parnell would not 
consider it his duty to use his immense personal influence 
for the purpose of assisting in the preservation of law and 
order in Ireland; to which Mr. Parnell had replied, '' Most 
undoubtedly.-"' Captain 0^8hea received a letter next day 
from the Prime Minister, in reply to which, on the loth. 
Captain O^Shea sent the statement on Irish affairs, and 
also mentioned having seen Mr. Parnell, but that Mr. Par- 
nell was unaware of his intention to write. The Prime 
Minister replied in a letter expressing his warm desire for 
the pacification of Ireland. Captain O^Shea had also writ- 
ten to Mr. Chamberlain, inclosing a copy of his letter to 
the Prime Minister; and Mr. Chamberlain had replied, 
concurring with his view that it was the duty of the Gov- 
ernment to make themselves acquainted with representa- 
tive opinion in Ireland; but urging, on the other hand, 
that the leaders of the Irish party should pay attention to 
public opinion in England and Scotland. Inspired with 
confidence by these two letters. Captain O'Shea had many 
conversations with members of the Government, including 
Mr. Forster. Through Mr. Forster he was enabled to cor- 
respond privately with Mr. Parnell in prison, and Mr. 
Forster gave him the pass which allowed him to visit Mr. 
Parnell in Kilmainham. On April 30 he handed Mr. 
Forster the letter from Mr. Parnell which had been read to 
the House. After he had done so it occurred to him that 
one phrase in that letter might be misunderstood by the 
only persons who he could have suioposed would ever see 



202 EKGLAJfD UNDER GLADSTONE. 

it. He accordingly saw a Cabinet minister, and stating to 
him that he considered his authority extended to the use of 
his own judgment in such a matter, asked that the sentence 
in question should be expunged. Mr. Parnell had kept no 
<copy of the letter, and when he accordingly asked Captain 
O'Shea for a copy to read to the House, Captain O^Shea 
wrote out what he believed to be a true copy and gave it to 
Mr. Parnell, who had no idea that there was any omission 
whatever in the letter. 

Mr. Forster then made an explanation. According to 
the late Chief Secretary he had had an interview with Oaj)- 
tain O^Shea after his return from Kilmainham, and had 
made a memorandum of the conversation. According to 
this memorandum Mr. Forster was dissatisfied with Mr. 
Parneirs letter to Captain O^Shea, who offered to get other 
words, but said that what was obtained was *' that the con- 
spiracy which had been used to get up Boycotting and out- 
rages will now be used to put them down.^" Here Captain 
O^Shea interposed, objecting to the word "conspiracy.'"' 
Organization, was, he believed, the word used. Mr. Fors- 
ter went on to say that Captain 0^ Shea said that Mr. Par- 
nell hoped to get back from abroad a released suspect 
named Sheridan, who would be able to help him to put 
down agitation, "as he knew all its details in the west.^^ 
Mr. Forster began to regret that he had had anything to 
do with the negotiation, and resolved that he would have 
nothing more to do with it. 

Now came Mr. ParnelFs turn, and the House listened to 
his explanation with the greatest curiosity. The letter he 
had written to Captain O'Shea was marked " private and 
confidential,'' and was never meant to be shown to Mr. 
Forster. If Captain O'Shea had made use of any sugges- 
tion about an organization which had been used to promote 
outrages being used again to put them down, it was on his 
own responsibility, for he (Mr. Parnell) had used no such 
words and conveyed no such impression. With regard to 
Mr. Sheridan, all Mr. Parnell had asked was " that Mr. 
Sheridan and Mr. Egan might be jjermitted to come back 
in the event of this question being settled; he also men- 
tioned Mr. Davitt's name, saying that it was of great im- 
portance that Mr. Havitt should be released. Mr. Sheri- 
dan was — and he had so told his honorable friend — one of 
the chief organizers of the Land League in Connaught. 



EIs^GLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 205^ 

He had told his honorable friend that if Mr. Sheridan were? 
permitted to return to Ireland;, he believed he would be 
able to use his influence to discourage the commission of 
outrages^, and to induce the tenantry to accept this settle- 
ment of the arrears question/' He had no reason to be- 
lieve that Mr. Sheridan had ever incited to the commission 
of any crime. There was some further slight discussion 
that day, but the matter was renewed the following day, 
Tuesday, 16th, when Sir Stafford Northcote asked the 
Prime Minister what other members of the Government 
besides the Prime Minister and Mr. Forster had communi- 
cation, direct or indirect, with Mr. Parnell before his re- 
lease; whether these communications were made known to- 
the Government as a whole, or to Mr. Forster in particu- 
lar; whether any members of the Government nad personal 
interviews with Mr. Parnell before his release, and how far 
the release of Michael Davitt was stipulated for in the com- 
munications. Mr. Gladstone replied, pointing out that 
the House was already aware that Captain O'Shea had had 
communication with Mr. Chamberlain as well as with him- 
self and Mr. Forster. With regard to the second question, 
Mr. Gladstone had no knowledge of the matter except what 
was in 230ssession of his colleagues in the Government as a 
whole, and such he believed to be the case with regard tO' 
Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. Forster. No members of the 
Government had had personal interviews with Mr. Parnell,, 
and no stipulations had been made for the release of Mr. 
Michael Davitt. After some desultory wrangling, Mr. A. 
J. Balfour moved the adjournment of the House, and at- 
tacked the Government for having made a compromise 
with Mr. Parnell by which Mr. Parnell was to get his re- 
lease and legislation as to arrears, while the Government 
was to obtain in return peace in Ireland and Parliamentary 
support. Mr. Gladstone angrily replied that there was not 
one word of truth in Mr. Balfour's accusation from begin- 
ning to end, and defied him to prove his charges. Mr. 
Gibson then followed with a long speech, in which he de- 
scribed the letter sent by Mr. Parnell to Captain O'Shea as 
a protocol — " a dispatch sent by an engaging and attract- 
ive embassador, who had the usual diplomatic direction as 
to leaving a copy with the other party, and giving any fur- 
ther explanation that might be demanded.'' This letter, 
as addressed to shrewd, capable men, and not to simple- 



:204 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

tons, distinctly disclosed three considerations which were 
to move from the Government, and two that were to move 
from the member for Cork. The question of the release 
of the writer was not mentioned, because it was too obvious 
to be stated. No Government entertaining such a letter 
would keep its writer in custody twenty-four hours after- 
ward. Sir William Harcourt answered with a slashing, 
hard-hitting defense of the Government, denying the exist- 
ence of any secret understanding, and delivering a clever 
side stroke at Mr. Forster for having read a memorandum 
of a private conversation, without going through the usual 
diplomatic practice of first submitting it to the other party 
to the conversation, in order to know whether he admits 
the accuracy of it. More futile debating, if, indeed, j^rofit- 
less recrimination could be called debating, followed, and 
then Mr. Chamberlain gave an explanation. With regard 
to the famous omitted sentence in the Parnell letter, Mr. 
Chamberlain said that Captain O^Shea had indeed ex- 
pressed his wish to have one sentence of it withdrawn, but 
Mr. Chamberlain had not paid much attention to this de- 
sire : first,' because he could not see what authority Captain 
0' Shea had to withdraw any part of the letter; and next, 
because he did not consider the matter of sujfficient impor- 
tance. In fact, it so entirely escaped his memory, that 
when the letter was read out by Mr. Parnell, he had not 
the slightest idea that any sentence had been withdrawn 
from it. As to Mr. Forster^s memorandum, with Mr. 
Parneirs pledge to use the organization which had been ' 
employed in getting up outrages to put them down again,, 
he had never attached much importance to it, because it 
iippeared to him on the face of things absolutely impossible 
to suppose that Mr. Parnell, whom every one knew to be a 
man of great ability, " would have committed the supreme 
folly of making such an incriminating confession. " Mr. 
Chamberlain therefore assumed that these words, if used 
at all, had been used by Captain O^Shea; in which case 
they Avere of small importance, because Captain O'Shea 
was not a member of Mr. Parneirs party, nor even a fol- 
lower of Mr. Parnell, and would undoubtedly regard the 
Land League with very different eyes from Mr. Parnell. 
This debate did not definitely close the Kilmainham ques- 
tion, it still kept cropping ujo every now and then, often in 
debates where it was least expected, still more often in the 



EKGLAKD UKT)ER GLADSTONE. 205 

form of ingenious questions to members of the Govern- 
ment. It made one of its latest appearances when Mr. 
Eeginald Yorke tried to interrupt the progress of tha Pro- 
cedure Rules by moving for a committee to inquire into the 
whole business, and the motion was talked out. But noth- 
ing further came of questions or debates, and indeed just 
then the public mind was somewhat diverted from any 
•question of the Kilmainham compacts by the two important 
Irish measures which immediately occupied the attention 
-of the House, the new Coercion Bill and the Arrears Bill. 

It is not necessary to go at any great length into the de- 
tail of the debates on these two measures. The Irish mem- 
bers opposed the Coercion Bill by all the means which the 
iorms of the House allowed them. On June 30 the ob- 
struction came to a head over the manner in which the 
^assessment on the rate-payers of any district, for compensa- 
tion where crime had been committed, should be made. 
Early in the afternoon rumors of an all-night sitting began 
to circulate through the lobbies. It was said that the Gov- 
ernment were determined to force down the Irish opposi- 
tion; that arrangement for relays had been arranged by the 
Ministerialist whips; that the Irish, on their side, were 
busily organizing their plans for an enduring struggle. 
The expectations were not disappointed, and the curious 
who had the courage to remain in the galleries of the House 
<all through the long hours of that debate may boast that 
they had witnessed one of the most exciting of the historical 
all-night sittings. June passed away and became July; 
the warm lights of the chamber were extinguished, and the 
gray summer morning lit up the dreary scene, and still the 
debate went on. Chairman after chairman had swayed, 
or tried to sway, the committee; Irish member after Irish 
jnember had spoken again and again on motion after mo- 
tion; there had been scenes of fierce attack and stormy 
recrimination, followed by long lulls of dull debate, during 
which the Commons seemed to have fallen into an apathy 
as complete, if not as pleasant, as that of the dwellers in 
the Castle of Indolence. At last, about nine o "clock on 
the Saturday morning, Mr. Playfair suddenly rose in the 
middle of a speech by Mr. Redmond, and warned the 
House that for the last three days the progress of business 
had been retarded by systematic obstruction, and that he 
should soon have to indicate to the committee who were the 



206 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

members engaged in it. Mr. Eedmond resumed his 
speech, but the warning had spread through the House;, 
and the almost empty chamber began suddenly to fill up 
again *in expectation of something new. From upper lob- 
bies, where they had been trying to sleep, from the dining- 
rooms, where they had been seeking to recruit their 
strength with hurried breakfasts, supporters of the Gov- 
ernment, members of the Opposition, and followers of Mr. 
Parnell came hurrying into the chamber in obedience to 
the summons of scouts, who had rushed out after Mr. Play- 
fair's warnins: to collect their forces. Mr. Plavfair had a 
good audience when he rose again, interrupting Mr. Red- 
mond, who was still sjoeaking. Mr. Playfair announced 
that the time had come to stop the systematic obstruction,, 
and he read out, amid loud and indignant protests from 
Mr. O^Donnell, who had just come, the names of fifteen. 
Irish members, whom he accused of taking part in it. 
Dramatical^, the stroke was a fine one; artistically speak- 
ing, it lacked rehearsal, for, whereas Mr. Plaj^fair read out 
the names of only fifteen Irish members to the House, Mr. 
Childers, whose duty it was to move their suspension, 
quickly inserted another name, and moved the susjDension 
of sixteen. On a division the suspension was carried by 
126 to 27, and the sixteen members immediately left the 
House. But the storm and stress was not over. Mr. Play- 
fair then rej^orted Mr. O'Donnell for having insulted the 
chair by his interruption when his name was read in the 
list of those sus2)ended. Mr. Joseph Co wen gave notice of 
a vote of censure on Mr. Plaj^air. The Irish members 
still left unsuspended carried on the debate with vigor un- 
abated, until, at about seven on the Saturday evening, Mr. 
Playfair named nine more Irish members, whose suspen- 
sion was carried by 128 to 7. There being then practically 
no Irish members left to carry on the debate, the Govern- 
ment ran through the amendments with great rapidity, 
passed the thirtieth clause, and progress was reported, after 
a continuous sitting of twenty-three hours. On Monday, 
July 3, Mr. O'DonnelFs case was brought forward, and 
Mr. O'Donnell was suspended from the service of the House 
for fourteen days. On Tuesday, July 4, Mr. Gladstone 
moved and carried, by 402 to 19, a motion that the busi- 
ness of the House was urgent. The Speaker then imme- 
diately rose and laid on the table the urgency rules that 



EKGLAiSTD UNDEE GLADSTOiTE. 207 

Lad been in force the previous year, suj)plemented by an 
additional rule, under which closure could be enforced by 
a majority of three to one. Mr. Justin McCarthy then 
rose and read a resolution, drawn up by the Irish party, 
condemning the conduct of the Government; after which 
the Irish party immediately left the House, to take no fur- 
ther part in the Coercion discussion. One result of the 
withdrawal was a Ministerialist defeat on July 7, on a Gov- 
ernment amendment to clause fourteen, regulating the 
right of the police to make midnight searches. The defec- 
tion of many of the Whigs was the primary cause of this 
clef eat. They were hostile to any amendment which in any 
way lessened the stringency of the Coercion Bill; and they 
preferred to risk a change of Ministry to allowing the Gov- 
ernment to carry a conciliatory amendment. There were 
wild rumors at once of resignations, of great Cabinet 
changes, even appeals to the country. Nothing, however, 
of the kind happened. Mr. Gladstone explained that under 
-ordinary circumstances he would have gone no further with 
the Bill, but that he could not do so in the existing condi- 
tion of Ireland, nor would he resign. v 

Once sent to the Lords, the Crimes Bill soon passed into 
law. The amended Arrears Bill was then carried after 
long debates in the Ci limons, and sent to the Lords, who 
■did not give it the same warm welcome that they had 
afforded to the Crimes Bill. Coercion is always congenial 
work to the Peers, but ameliorative legislation of any kind 
is opposed to their tastes and their traditions, and the 
^1 Arrears Bill was soon sent back to the Commons, cumbered 
with some heavy amendments that practically rendered it 
valuel^. Mr. Gladstone took the challenge of the Lords 
very composedly. The serious amendments which involved 
' any radical change in the nature of the measure he calmly 
declined to accept. For the sake of compromise he con- 
sented to accept some trifling amendment which scarcely 
altered anything, and so the Bill was returned to the Upper 
House. The Ministry were playing the part of Faulcon- 
bridge to the modern Lord Salisbury. 

"Put up thy sword betime. 
Or I'll so maul you and your toasting-iron 
That you shall think the devil is come from hell," 

are the words with which Shakespeare's Faulconbridge 
meets the anger of Lord Salisbury. Mr. Gladstone's reply 



208 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

to Lord Salisbury's successor was not couched in the same 
vehement terms, but it conve3'ed something of the same 
idea. The Lords felt that they had gone too far. The. 
country never, in the end, encourages the Lords to offer 
any prolonged resistance to the will of the Commons. 
Lord Salisbury, it is said, was all for fighting the matter 
out to the bitter end. Perhaps his warlike ardor was not 
diminished, but he was certain that his followers were not so 
bellicose as he, and that he might therefore be bold enough 
without any fear of causing a Ministerial complication, or 
provoking battle between the two Houses of Parliament. 
The Arrears Bill -'was accejjted without division, and be- 
came law on August 10. 

The Arrears Bill and the Crimes Bill were the only im- 
portant measures which the Government were able to deal 
with during this j^rotracted session. The Corrupt Prac- 
tices Bill had to be abandoned; the Ballot Act, instead of 
being improved, had to be bundled at the last moment inta 
the Expiring Acts Continuance Act. The Bankruptcy,. 
County Government, and Municipality of London Bills 
ne^er made their appearance at all. The Electric Light- 
ing Bill was carried by Mr. Chamberlain; it gave munici- 
palities the right to adopt the electric light for street and 
other purposes by the permission / of the Board of Trade 
alone, instead of a local Act of Parliament. Mr. Fawcett 
carried his Parcels Post Bill, enabling the Post-Office to 
convey and deliver parcels up to a prescribed limit of 
weight at a settled charge, without regard to distance. 
The Married Women's Property Bill, introduced by the 
Lord Chancellor, practically placed married men and mar- 
ried women on an equality before the law as far ^ regard- 
ed their private income, earnings, or inheritance. The 
Municipal Corporation Act and the Bills of Exchange Act, 
Earl Cairns's Settled Lands Bill, removing many of the 
restrictions in dealing with entailed estates, and a new edu- 
cation code were the principal other performances of the 
session. 

On April 24 Mr. Gladstone had brought forward a re- 
spectable, if somewhat colorless, budget. On July 24 he 
introduced a supplementary budget to meet the cost of the 
Egyptian War. He asked for a vote of credit for 
£2,300,000, of which £900,000 was for the army, and 
£1.400,000 for the navy. Mr. Gladstone proposed to meet 



ENGLAND UNDEE GLADSTONE. 309 

this by increasing the income tax from 5d to 8cL in the 
pound, which, as two quarters had already been collected 
on the lesser rate, was equal to the levy of a tax of Q^d. for 
the whole of the year. 

On August 15 a great national celebration took place in 
Dublin. The Exhibition of Irish Arts and Manufactures 
was opened. Foley^s statue of O^Oonnell, which had been 
set up at the lower end of Sackville Street, opposite to 
what was once called Carlisle, and is now called O^Con- 
nell. Bridge, was unyeiled. The peculiarity of the Dublin 
Exhibition was its entirely national character. For the 
first time in the history of Dublin since the Union an en- 
terprise was carried out which disdained the patronage of 
the Castle, and appealed directly to popular support. To- 
the great disappointment of the Castle clientele the exhibi- 
tion was a success. The building, skillfully and |)leasingly 
composed of that combination of glass and iron which Sir 
Joseph Paxton was the first to apply to the purposes of 
exhibitions, was erected -at the back of the Eotunda. In- 
side, it was crowded with the pi15ductions of Irish art and 
of Irish manufacture, which were the most convinciug 
arguments of the commercial possibilities of the country 
whenever her resources were j^roperly worked. This day 
of national celebration deserves to be commemorated for 
the perfect peace and order with which it passed off. 
There had been grave apprehengions in England, and in 
Ireland as well, that the celebration would be made the oc- 
casion for wild outbreak of some kind. The purely national 
character of the proceedings, the numbers of persons from 
the country round about the city who would flow into Dub- 
lin on the day, the excited condition of the people^ — all 
these were brought forward as arguments in favor of tha 
probability of some dangerous disturbance taking place. 
The authorities deserve commendation for the way in which 
they made no outward sign of being affected by any suck 
rumors. The surest way to have provoked some collision 
on such an occasion would have been to make an overawing 
demonstration of military or police force. The executive 
wisely did nothing of the kind. Every precaution w^as 
taken to meet any sudden emergency of unexpected riot, 
but no evidence of these precautions was made visible. In 
Sackville Street, which was of course the theater of that 
day^s events, with its exhibition at one end and its statue; 



210 ENGLAJ^D UNDER CTLADSTOI>rE. 

at the other, there were practically no police. As far as 
could be judged by the outward appearance of the city, its 
safety and welfare, its peace and order, were left in cliarge 
of the people themselves. The people acquitted themselves 
of their trust admirably, and thoroughly justified the 
authorities in acting with an unfortunately too rare sense 
and prudence. There was no rioting, no disturbance of 
any kind. The great procession of Dublin trades and 
guilds, headed by carriages containing the popular Irish 
members, went its appointed way all through the city in 
perfect quiet and order. The statue was unveiled, the ex- 
hibition was opened, all in peace. There was enthusiasm 
everywhere, but it was perfectly law-abiding entliusiasm. 

The next day the freedom of the city was conferred on 
Mr. Parnell and Mr. John Dillon. The same day another 
popular Irish member, Mr. Edmond Dwyer Gray, M.P., 
owner of the " Freeman ''s Journal, ^^ and High Sheriff of 
Dublin, was committed to Eichmond Prison, O^ConnelFs 
old prison, on a charge %f contempt of court, which was 
afterward the cause of a Parliamentary inquiry into the ex- 
"Crcise of that curious judicial privilege. Mr. Gray had 
written in the '^ Freeman^ s Journal ^^ some censures on 
the conduct of a jury whose verdict had sentenced a man to 
death. The jury had been accused of spending the night 
previous to the finding .of the verdict in a condition of 
noisy intoxication in the Imperial Hotel. Mr. Justice 
Lawson, the judge before whom the case had been tried, 
immediately summoned Mr. Gray before him, sent him to 
prison for three months, and fined him £500. After two 
months' imprisonment Mr. Gray was released; the fine was 
paid by public subscription in a few days. There was great 
excitement in Dublin when the news of the arrest was made 
known, and the fears of disturbance were at once revived; 
hut a proclamation, signed by the Lord MayoV, Mr. Daw- 
son, and by Mr. Parnell, was distributed through the city, 
urging the people to make no disturbance, an order which 
was im2:)licitly obeyed. Some of the Irish members in 
Dublin went back to London, where Parliament was just 
drawing to its end, to put the case before the House. !Mr. 
Gladstone, however, pointed out that the House of Com- 
mons was i)owerless to take any action in the matter. It 
could not possibly release Mr. Gray, and therefore he 
judged it best to leave the matter over for consideration 



ENGLAND UNDEE GLADSTONE. 211 

until the House met in October. When^ later in the year^, 
the whole question was made the subject of an inquiry of a 
Committee of the House of Commons, it w^as decided that 
no action could be taken, as Judge Lawson was within his^ 
legal right in what he had done. 

When the Land League was suppressed the secret socie- 
ties began to thrive again. In some parts of L'eland an 
organization known as Moonlighters, headed by a mysteri- 
ous Captain Moonlight, committed various crimes lor some 
time in secret, until a man was arrested who seemed to be, 
and said he was. Captain Moonlight himself. This man 
turning informer, many arrests were made. But the kind_ 
of ourtrages which moonlighting represented did not cease.- 
Nor did the accounts of outrages that never took place. 
The record was gloomy enough without the busy voices and 
tongues of rumor being allowed full license to spread 
abroad the wildest exaggerations. Archbishop Croke de- 
clared that many of the outrages were either invented or 
exaggerated, with the intent to rouse hostile feeling against 
the Land League and the National movement. 

Early in January two bailiffs named Huddy, an old man 
and his grandson, were murdered in Joyce^s country. Con- 
nemara, and their bodies thrown into Lough Mask. In 
February an informer named Bernard Bailey was shot 
dead in the streets of Dublin. In April an attempt was 
made to murder Mr. Smythe, an unpopular land-owner in 
AVestmeath. The shots fired* missed Mr. Smythe, and 
killed his sister-in-law, who was sitting in the carriage with 
him. In May came the Phoenix Park murders. In June 
Mr. Walter Bourke and his military escort were shot dead. 
In the same month Mr. John Henry Blake and his steward,, 
Mr. Keene, were both shot dead near Lough Pea. In 
August, a fresh murder in the Joyce country was su|)|)osed 
to reveal the authors of the murders of the Huddys. This 
murder took place in Maamtrasna, on August 17. A 
family of the name of Joyce were murdered by a party of 
men, their neighbors, who feared that the victims knew 
and would betray the murderers of the Huddys. The 
alleged murderers of the Joyces were arrested, tried, con- 
victed; three of them were hanged. One of the three, 
Myles Joyce, was declared by his companions to be inno- 
cent. The evidence against him was terribly unreliable,, 
but though an inquiry was often asked for, it was always^ 



"212 ENGLAND UNDEH" GLADSTONE. 

refused. Five others pleaded guilty, and were sentenced 
to death, but the death penalty was commuted. In Novem- 
ber a man was arrested for an attempt to assassinate Jus- 
tice Lawson. Toward the end of the same month an at- 
tack was made. There was a scuffle in Abbey Street 
between some detectives and some armed men whom they 
were watching, and o?ie of the detectives was killed. The 
next night, November 26, a man named Field, who had 
been a juryman in the trial of a man named Walsh, who 
was executed for the murder of a policeman at Letterfrack, 
was attacked outside his house in Frederick Street, and 
dangerously wounded. His assailants escaped for the time, 
and their victim, though severely wounded, recovered. 



CHAPTER Xin. 

EGYPT. 

To understand the position in which England found her- 
self placed with regard to Egypt, it is necessary to look 
back a little into the history of modern Egypt, and exam- 
ine the causes vdiich led to the present crisis. 

As far as we are immediately concerned, the Egyptian 
question began when Mehemet Ali flung off the complete 
control of the Porte, and finally established himself as a 
vassal, indeed, but only of a nominal vassalage, to the 
Turkish Emi^ire. Mehemet Ali had made himself master 
of Syria, and he and his adopted son, Ibrahim Pasha, in- 
flicted defeat after defeat upon the armies of Tin-key. In 
1839 a series of events combined to give over Egypt into 
the hands of Mehemet Ali. Ibrahim gained a great tri- 
umph over the Porte. The Sultan Mahmoud died. The 
Turkish Admiral with all his fleet went over to the cause 
of Egypt. Had he been left to himself Mehemet Ali would 
not even have allowed the Ottoman Empire to keep any 
semblance of authority; but the Powers of Europe inter- 
fered then, as they have interfered since, with Egyjotian 
politics. England, Austria, Prussia, and Russia combined 
to restrain the Porters rebellious vassal. France alone, 
swayed by the jealous spirit of Thiers, who dreaded an 
English plot to lay hold of Egyjot, held aloof from the alli-t 
ance, and was at one time not very far from going to war 



"*" ' Ei^GLAN^D UI^^DEE GLADSTOIs"E. 213 

witli England. Two treaties signed in London in the 
Julys of 1840 and 1841, arranged the affairs of Egypt;, and 
compelled Mehemet Ali, sorely against his will, to giye up 
his Asiatic possessions, and to accept the suzerainty of the 
Porte. But he demanded, and demanded successfully, the 
hereditary transmission of the yiceroyalty to the eldest 
male heir of his own line, and a degree of independence 
which left the Sultan little more than the shadow of com- 
mand. The most varied judgments have been formed of 
the character of Mehemet Ali. All historians are com- 
pelled to agree upon the ferocity which crushed the power 
of the Mamelukes by a more than Elizabethan treachery; 
but Mehemet Ali appears to some historians as on the 
whole, for an Oriental, a great and just ruler. He seemed 
to Richard Oobden nothing more than " a rapacious 
tyrant. '^ 

Cobden, who saw Mehemet Ali in Cairo in 1836, when 
the Pasha was still dreaming of the future of Egypt and 
himself, wrote thus: " Mehemet Ali is pursuing a course 
of avaricious misrule which would have torn the vitals from 
a country less prolific than this, long since. As it is, 
everything is decaying beneath his system of monopolies. 
The Pasha has, by dint of force and fraud, possessed him- 
self of the whole of the property of the country. I do not 
mean that he has obtained merely the rule of the Govern- 
ment, but he owns the whole of the soil, the houses, the 
boats, the camels, etc. There is something quite unique 
in finding only one land-owner and one merchant in a 
country, in the person of its Pasha. " Cobden goes on to 
describe the magnificent cotton-works which Mehemet Ali 
had built, and the miserable way in which they were 
allowed to go to ruin: *' All .this is not the work of 
Mehemet Ali. The miserable adventurers from Europe 
who have come here to act the parasites of such a blood- 
stained despot — they are partly the cause of the evil. But 
they know his selfish nature and his lust of fame, and this 
is only their mode of deluding the one and pandering to 
the other. " The opinion of a man like Richard Cobden 
on such a matter is of the profoundest political importance, 
but we who are his warmest admirers may well believe 
that the picture drawn by the young traveler of thirty-three 
years was somewhat highly colored; that the peculiar 
characteristics of all Oriental rule were not sufficiently 



214: ENGLAi^D UisDER GLADSTONE. 

taken into account in estimating the character of Meheniet 
Ahr At least he tried to make Egypt great as he had mado 
her independent, and he failed only because he attempted 
to raise Egypt at once to the level of a great power. In 
1848, when madness deprived Egypt of her strange ruler, 
the succession came to his son, Ibrahim Pasha, whose 
statue stands in the Cairo Square, to remind the traveler 
from afar, and the Arab who lounges at its base, that 
Egypt had a past, and may yet have a future. But the 
hero of Koniah and jSTezib was not destined to be famous as 
a Pasha of Egypt. He died within four months of his ac- 
cession, and was succeeded by Abbas Pasha, the son of 
that son of Mehemet Ali whose tragic end is told by War- 
burton. Ismail Pasha, Mehemet All's second son, was 
burned to death by a Soudan chief, Nemmir, ^' the tiger,'' 
King of Shendy, from whom he had too imperiously de- 
manded tribute. Under Abbas Pasha nothing was done to 
advance Egypt. A Tacitus or a Suetonius is needed to 
fitly present this Egyptian copy of the degraded Caesars. 
He lived, like a later Roman Emperor, a vicious, fearful 
life, ever dreading the death by assassination which came 
at last in 1854, and handed over Egy2)t to Said Pasha. 
The contrast between Said and Abbas Pasha is as great as 
between Marcus Aurelius and Nero. Where Abbas was 
lonely, hostile to foreigners, and unable to speak any of the 
alien tongues. Said was hospitable, closely linked with 
Europeans, whose life he carefully imitated, and he was it 
brilliant French scholar. He encouraged foreign immigra- 
tion, inaugurated the custom of employing Europeans in 
all the important administrations, and he greatly advanced 
the general condition of the country by removing many of 
the meaningless restrictions upon trade and commerce, and 
by seeming to recognize that the Egyptian laborer was 
something more than a mere beast to be worked and taxed 
to death. Through the influence of England, the railroad 
system had been established in Egypt during the rule of 
Abbas. Under Said's prospering reign railways and tele- 
graphs were extended over Egypt. The Suez Canal was 
begun. Machinery of all kinds became familiar to the 
Egyptian mind, and the finances showed an increased rev- 
enue of six millions a year. But while Abbas, with all his 
faults, left Egypt not only agricidturally prosperous, but 
clear of debt. Said, with all liis virtues, left her the begin- 



ENGLAISTD UNDEE GLADSTOl^E. 215 

ning of that public debt which is now of such intense inter- 
est to the outer world. A series of strange chances 
allowed Ismail Pasha^ warrior Ibiahim^s second son^ to be- 
come the immediate successor of Said Pasha^ and with his 
accession in 1863 begins the particular condition of things 
wdiich we familiarly speak of as the Egyptian question. 
Under the foreign policy of Nubar Pasha^ Ismail succeed- 
ed, in 1866^ in obtaining from the Porte the title of Khe- 
dive, and the direct descent of the title from father to son, 
on consideration of increasing the annual tribute from 
nearly four hundred thousand pounds to nearly seven hun- 
dred thousand pounds. Again, in 1872, the Khedive ob- 
tained the privilege of making treaties with foreign Powers, 
of owning vessels of war, and of raising troops. Indeed, 
the whole of IsmaiFs reign was marked by steady and in- 
cessant aggrandizement of the power and the position of 
Egypt, and the weakening of the chains which bound her 
to the Ottoman Empire. But for every step which Egypt 
thus took, for every link she severed in the Turkish chain, 
she had to pay a heavy price to court and courtiers at Con- 
stantinople. 

If the Khedive was prepared to spend money freely for 
his own personal advancement and authority, he was no 
less lavish for the advancement of his country. Improve- 
ments of all kinds were carried out; the Suez Canal was 
completed — by the corvee — railroads and telegraphs in- 
creased rapidly. Ismail was going too fast. Egypt pros- 
pered socially and commercially; financially it was a great 
failure. With all his talent, Ismail Pasha lacked several 
of the qualities necessary for a great financier, and between 
his fingers the money of Egypt ran like desert sand. Cot- 
ton fell. Ismail became deeplj in debt to the European 
Powers, most of all to France and England, and anxiety 
for the security of the shareholders furnished these two 
Powers with justification for a close inquiry into the finan- 
cial condition of the country. 

The first decade of Ismail Pasha^s reign showed an ap- 
parently widespread prosperity, and a corresponding 
increase in the public debt. The 1864 loan of £5,700,000 
was supplemented in 1868 and 1870 by further loans for 
£3,000,000, £1,200,000, and £2,000,000, and in 1873 there 
was another for £32,000,000 in Mr. Dicey^s round num- 
bers. The Khedive^s private loans were about £11,000,- 



216 ENGLAND UNDEK GLADSTONE. 

000, and the floating debt represented from £25,000,000 to 
£26,000,000. Up to 1870 the regidar payment of the higli 
rate of interest kept good the credit of Egypt. But the 
Russo-Turkish war, while it revealed the emptiness of tlie 
Ottoman treasury, served also to unsettle men^s certainty 
of the credit of Egypt. Unable to rjMse fresh loans, or to 
meet the demands uj)on him, the desperate Khedive sold 
all his shares in the Suez Canal to England for the sum of 
four millions, in November, 1875. The idea of buying 
the Khedivial shares belongs to Mr. Frederick Greenwood. 
It was hailed with general delight at the time, though it 
was then, and has since been, savagely attacked by a cer- 
tain kind of Liberal politicians. Mr. Dicey points out that 
it is certainly a fiuancial success, as the shares are now 
worth more than double the price we paid for them. As- 
suming the importance of a control of the Suez Canal ta 
England, it is difficult to see how she could have done 
better than buy of the well-nigh bankrupt Khedive. The 
politicians who were most bitterly op230sed to the purchase 
would have been still more unwilling to see England set a 
corporaFs guard at Port Said, and hoist the Union Jack iu 
the Egyi^tian Delta. At all events, England had her 
shares, and the Khedive his four millions, but he did not 
keep them long. Four millions were soon swallow^ed up in 
the whirlpool of his debts, and money was as much needed 
as ever. The Khedive turned again to England. A 
nation who was so ready to buy might no less readily lend, 
but the Khedive was shrewd enough to know that she 
would not lend without security. He invited England ta 
study the state of his finances before advancing, and Eng- 
land, in reply, sent out the late Mr. Cave, at the end of 
1875. 

The revenue was drawn from direct taxes on land, on 
date-trees, on trade licenses; from indirect taxation in the 
form of custom and tobacco duties; from the Moukabaleb, 
the village annuities, from railway profits, and miscellane- 
ous dues. The Moukabaleh, which means compensation, 
was a fancy measure introduced in 1871 ostensibly to re- 
deem half the land tax, in the hope of paying off the float- 
ing debt. The Government undertook to give the Egyp- 
tian landholders, who had no regular title-deeds, indefeasi- 
ble titles, and to reduce, permanently, the land tax by one 
half, in consideration of their priving s^ix j^ears^ land tax in 



EXGLAifD UKDER GLADSTOI^E. 217 

advance; a financial operation which has introduced terri- 
ble complications into the duty of unraveling the Egyptian 
finances. 

Mr. Cave made his famous report, showing that nothing 
could be done without accepting heavy pecuniary responsi- 
bility. Then he returned home, and Mr. , now Sir Eivers, 
"Wilson, the controller of our own National Debt Office, 
went out to advise the Khedive, only to be recalled soon 
after. The Khedive had so far failed to draw England, 
and at last, in May, 1876, he calmly issued a decree of 
repudiation. This was rendered a dead letter by the inter- 
national courts, tribunals which had been substituted by 
the European Powers for the old consular jurisdiction, and 
which had great authority in Egypt. These courts decided 
that the Khedive had broken his contract to his foreign 
creditors, and his May decree took no effect. The French 
hondholders then proposed a scheme of their own for the 
consolidation of the debt, which fell through, owing to the 
objections of the English bond-holders. The two parties 
then agreed to send out a joint mission to negotiate with 
the Khedive, and Mr. Goschen and M. Joubert proceeded 
to Egypt at the end of 1876. The Khedive agreed with 
them to 23ay an annual sum, as interest and sinking-fund, 
of about, in round numbers, seven per cent, on a capital of 
^100,000,000. But Ismail, who, when the question was 
one of borrowing money, had contrived to show marvelous- 
iy good revenue statements, was equally dexterous in show- 
ing bad statements when the question was how much the 
State could pay on its debt. In less than a year he declared 
that this arrangement was based upon highly untrustworthy 
returns, that the debt must be reduced, or Eg3rpt would be 
ruined by the taxation enforced to pay the interest', and 
once more he demanded a fresh commission. 

When a country has once accepted an investigation of its 
finances by foreign Powers, and given the practical control 
of its treasury into the hands of foreign representatives, its 
claim to independence can hardly fail to be regarded as 
isignally diminished; and it is hardly surprising that both 
England and France began to think themselves something 
more than the mere friends and advisers of the Khedive. 
A suspicion of the Khedive^ s honesty led the French Gov- 
ernment to decide that any inquiry now set on foot should 
apply itself, not only to ascertaining the resources of Egypt, 



21S ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

but the causes which brought about Egypt^s embarrass- 
ments. In this demand England was induced to Join, and 
the Khedive was forced to allow a commission to practic- 
ally place him upon his trial. It was soon shown that- 
the Khedive had become the owner of one-fifth of the entire- 
cultivated land of Egyi^t, and that the funds oppressively 
raised from this vast monopoly were, in Mr. Dicey 's 
words, " so miserably administered as to result in a loss, 
not only to the country at large, but to the Khedive him- 
self. " A threat of the Khedive ^s, that he would be unable 
to pay interest on the United Debt in full, forced matters 
to a crisis. France insisted on the interest being paid in 
full, and somehow or other jDaid in full it was. This 
strong action on the part of a European Power may have? 
convinced the Khedive of the hojDclessness of his position. 
At last he met the rei3ort of the commission, w^hich de- 
clared that real financial reform must commence with the 
concession of his estates, by yielding up a million of acres; 
of Daira land to the creditors of the State. 

The next step in the work of the commission — the 
inquiry as to what amount the country could afford to pay- 
annually in respect of its debts, without injury to its own 
interests and to those of its creditors — was interrupted by 
the Khedive^s unexpected summons of Nubar Pasha from 
exile to form a Ministry, in which the portfolio of fiiiance 
was to be intrusted to Mr. Elvers Wilson. Mr. Eivers 
Wilson was controller-general of the English National 
Debt, and he succeeded in obtaining permission from his 
own Government to retain this office while accepting the 
portfolio offered him by the Khedive. This permission 
aroused the gravest suspicion in France, where it seemed 
to statesmen as if England, after all her pledges, was seek- 
ing by underhand means to obtain complete supremacy in 
Egypt; and, in order to satisfy the complaints of France, 
M. de Blignieres w^as appointed, much aganist England^s 
will, as tlie colleague of Mr. Rivers Wilson in the new 
Nubar Ministry. 

Having yielded thus far, and made such concessions, the 
Khedive was seized again with a despotic mania, which led 
him, on the strength of a small army emeiite, to dismiss 
Nubar Pasha, and shortly after to dispense witli the 
services of his French and English ministers. The dis- 
missal of the Anglo-French ministers caused greater annoy- 



EE"GLAND TNDEE GLADSTONE. 219 

aiice even to France than to England, and tlie Frencli 
Government proposed to compel the Khedive by armed 
force to reinstate Mr. Elvers Wilson and M. de Blignieres. 
The arguments of England, however, prevented this step, 
■and strong dispatches alone were addressed to the Khedive. 
This action convinced the Khedive that he was perfectly 
safe in doing as he liked, and naturally he did not reinstate 
iiis Ministry. His former clique of Pashas were restored 
to power, Subar and Eiaz Pashas were exiled, and money 
was raised in the old evil ways. The warnings of England 
and France were despised, and he finally issued a decree, 
leaving entirely in his own hands the regulation of the lia- 
bilities of Egypt. The Khedive appeared to be entirely 
triumphant, and France and England seemed content to 
•do nothing, when the sudden intervention of Germany 
forced them into action. The German consul at Cairo in- 
formed the Khedive that the German Government was pre- 
pared to defend the interests of German subjects at all haz- 
ards. Then England and France joined together, and 
.accepted the offer which had been made before by the 
Sultan to depose the Khedive. The moment the order 
came, the power and triumph of Ismail Pasha vanished 
into nothingness, and the bold defier of united England 
=^nd France hurried away as rapidly as he could to Naples 
with his harem aud his ill-gotten treasure, leaving his son 
'Tewfik on the throne. 

After the fall of Ismail the Anglo-French influence was 
:re-established. M. de Blignieres was reinstated, and Mr. 
Baring, who was afterward succeeded by Mr. Colvin, took 
, the place of Mr. Rivers Wilson. They were given great 
authority. They had the right to be present on the minis- 
- terial council, to advise on all financial questions, to ap- 
point resident inspectors and receive their reports, and 
they were irremovable save with the consent of England 
;and France. But in the face of their trying task even such 
powers seemed slight. Their difficulties lay not alone in 
Egypt; Austria, France, and Italy insisted that any finan- 
cial settlement must be arranged by an international com- 
mission, in which other Powers besides France and Eng- 
land should be represented; and such a commission ^as at 
length appointed, with French, English, German, Austrian 
and Italian members. The powers of the commission were 
:theoretically unlimited; practically they had many limita- 



220 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

tions. They could not, like ordinary liquidators, bring the 
bankrupt whose estate they were considering to reason. 
So long as the European Powers were not agreed together 
in compelling the Khedive to accept the advice of the com- 
mission, the commission had to wait his consent for any 
arrangement they made. As Mr. Dicey shows, the bank- 
rujDt was able to estimate his own revenue, to fix his own 
allowance, and to ajDpropriate the bulk of an eventful sur- 
plus, after which the liquidators were allowed to distribute 
the sum which the bankruj)t considered available for the 
payment of a composition to his creditors. The Mouka- 
baleh claims were quietly shelved, after a fashion much 
more agreeable to the Egyptian Government than to the 
claimants. To Mr. Dicey the liquidation seems " not iit 
any sense a comj^rehensive settlement of the Egyptian 
financial problem;^' and he maintains that '^ the consoli- 
dation of all Egyptian loans into one stock, paying one 
uniform rate of interest, and the collection of the revenue 
by one central administration, are the essential conditions 
of any effective and permanent reorganization of Egypt. ' ' 

In the meantime, however, there had been growing up 
in Egypt a spirit of hostility to the Euroj^ean intervention. 
A j)arty calling itself the National party began to lift its 
head against foreign rule. *' EgyjDt for the Egj'ptians'^ 
was its cry; it refused to tolerate ministers representing^ 
some special European influence; it demanded for Egj^j^t 
the right to govern itself in its own way. The doctrines of 
the party, at first circulated by stealth, soon became more 
widely known; it was presently to be discovered that it had 
the army at its back. A bloodless insurrection, the fa- 
mous *' insurrection of the Colonels,^' suddenly gave the 
National party a position and a leader. This leader was 
Arabi Bey, who for a time ajDjieared to hold the fortunes of 
the Egyptian Government, as Kossuth held the destinies of 
the House of Hapsburg, in the hollow of his hand. From 
the day when the soldiery of the citadel pronounced 
against the Khedive, the star of Arabi Bey was in the- 
ascendant. The so-called Egyptian Parliament was no 
sooner summoned than it found its real master in the 
Colonel, and not in the Khedive. Tewfik^s Ministry fell 
before his dictation; the Ministry that took its j^lace was 
j^ractically in his hands. A wondei'ing world began to ask 
whether Arabi Bey was the ('fORrvcll of a great movement 



EKGLAKD UKDEE GLADSTONE. 221 

against an Egyptian Charles; tlie Garibaldi of a struggle 
for national liberty against a foreign rule; a scheming 
political adventm-er, fighting for his own hand like Hal of 
the Wynd, or only a puppet, whose actions were guided by 
mysterious unseen strings. Sir AVilliam Gregory, who was 
in Egypt at this time, told the world in a letter to the 
" Times '' what he thought of the practical dictator of 
Egypt. He saw in Arabi Bey a man of great and patriotic 
ideas, with the eloquence of Sophocles" Antigone, and in- 
spired by the loftiest love of his country. This 023inion 
was practically shared by another Englishman, whose 
name is associated with Egyptian politics, Mr. W. S. 
Blmit, who, having sung of many loves under the name of 
Proteus, found sterner pleasure in the struggles of the 
Egyptian democracy. 

There were no visible signs ■ of danger in Egypt in the 
end of 1881 or the beginning of 1882. European tourists 
lounged lazily on the veranda at Shepheard^s, and consent- 
ed to be amused by the snake-charmers, ape-leaders, and 
juggling-girls, who made merry for them in the street 
below. They rode out to the citadel, or across the lion- 
guarded bridge which led to the Pyramids, mounted on the 
stout, fleet donkeys that are the delight of the Englishman 
in Egypt. They haggled in the bazaars, .and stared at the 
wonders of Boulak with listless wonder, and drove in the 
Shoubra to catch a glimpse of the pale face of the Khedive 
as he passed by. They — the males of them — made little 
excursions at night into the depths of the town, spent a 
few minutes in a hasheesh den, or a dancing-house, or 
flung 'away a five-franc piece at ^'Eldorado,"" and fond ly 
fancied that they were seeing life, and would return l-: 
England as thoroughly Orientalized versions of Tom aiici 
Jerry. To aid this transformation they, of course, bought 
tar-bushes and colossal amber mouth-pieces. They were 
quite happy and secure, enjoying themselves along the 
Nile, and in what their ancestors called Grand Cairo — very- 
much like the grand seigneurs and fair ladies reveling in- 
Versailles before Paris marched upon them, or like those 
old Romans in the theater, to whom the startled actress 
shrieked out that she saw the Gauls coming. And yet 
there was danger about them. There was revolution in 
the air. Tourists starting off for a run down to Luxor, or 
the first cataract, would laughingly wonder if ^' the revolu- 



:222 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

tion '^ would break out before their return. People who 
liacl lived long in Cairo or Alexandria shook their heads, 
-and said that anything might happen. Everybody seemed 
to expect something; nobody seemed to be alarmed. There 
is a loud shouting in the street, and a carriage drives by, 
surrounded by a crowd of running footmen, and greeted by 
the Oriental crowd with loud acclaim. It only contains a 
soldier-looking man, no longer j^oung, in Egyptian uni- 
form. The languid people on the Shepheard jiiazza get up 
to see; the lounging British and French in the street stop 
and look round to watch Arabi Bey whirl by, and talk to 
•each other of him when he is out of sight. Is he going to 
dethrone the Kliedive? Will the Khedive imprison him? 
When will the revolution come? Yes, everj^body seems to 
•expect the revolution, and yet nobody, except perhaps a 
few of the old hands who have lived long in the East, 
seems at all frightened. W^ho would be alarmed by talk of 
a revolution at Margate; of the danger of a popular move- 
ment in Pegwell Bay? All these donkey-riders, these 
Mouski haunters, these drifters down the Nile in dahabiehs 
or steamers managed by Cook, regard Alexandria and 
Cairo very much as they would regard Margate or Pegwell 
Bay, or Boulogne-sur-Mer. They have been there often; 
most of the people they know have been there. It is as 
easy to get to Cairo as to Paris. Mr. 'Cook will see you 
there and back, and you need never, if you so please, hear 
a word of any tongue but English, or move among other 
associates than the tweed-cl-ad traveling Briton. Egypt 
was a pleasant ground for Englislimen, and though the 
Egyptians might come to blows among themselves, no 
harm c^uld possibly hapj^en to the tourist in his pith hel- 
met, who bought tar-bushes and cheap attar of roses, and 
was beloved by Egyptian donkey-boys. The British or 
Erench tourist was not alarmed, because neither the British 
tourist nor his Erench companion could possibly believe 
that he was in the slightest danger. 

People at home were scarcely less self-confident in a 
.somewhat different way. We had put up the Khedive, it 
was argued, and of course no one in his senses, Arabi Bey 
or another, could dream of trying to .knock him down 
again. Arabi Bey was only an adventurer after all; he 
had no following whatever, except a few discontented 
colonels in the army; and as for the people, the fellaheen 



ENGLAND UisTDEE GLADSTONE. 223- 

neither knew nor cared for the name of the authority to 
whom they paid their taxes. There was no National party 
at all.^ It was only the dream of a few well-meaning En- 
glish sympathizers^ and a few needy speculators. The 
British Ministry seemed to be saturated with this kind of 
sentiment. To the yery last they persisted in regarding- 
Ahmed Arabi as a mere military adventurer, with little or 
no real influence, and practically no adherents. Neverthe- 
less it did become obvious, as the days went on, that some- 
thing would have to be done to keep Egypt in order. 1881 
had faded into 1882, and 188.2 was getting on in its youth., 
and things had not quieted down in Egypt, and Arabi haci 
not disappeared. The English Government kept their 
counsels and their aims very close. The Opposition per- 
sisted in trying again and again, always unsuccessfully, to 
find out what steps the Government really meant to take 
with regard to what was now known as the Egyptian ques- 
tion, when it was not called the Egyptian difficulty. 

Tlie curious attempt to introduce Parliamentary institu- 
tions into Egypt was not very successful. In the old days: 
of the former Egyptian Parliament it was impossible to 
carry on the little game, owing to the refusal of any mem- 
ber to play at being in opposition. Ismail is said to have 
suggested, entreated, bribed, and threatened in vain; he 
could not by any means get up even a decent show of op- 
position to his Ministry and himself. Tewfik''s assembly of 
Notables had not proved quite so futile. It had encour- 
aged and supported the military party; it had strengthened 
Arabics position as representative of the claims of the mal- 
content colonels. England had favored the formation of 
the Egyptian Parliament; but she now got alarmed at the 
result of the experiment, and made ready, if the worst 
came to the worst, to put down the military party by force. 
But before anything could be done by anybody there had 
to be a vast amount of diplomatic negotiations between the 
representatives of the great Powers of Europe. The chief 
difficulty to any settlement from outside of the affairs of 
Egypt* lay. in the peculiar relations between France and 
England in that country. However much Mr. Dicey, and 
the political school which he represents, might regret that 
England had ever allowed France to obtain a foothold irt 
Egypt, there appeared to be no use in wasting time in re- 
gret now. France was in Egypt; it seemed most unlikely) 



22-i EK'GLAI^n u:N"DER GLADSTONE. 

that she would consent to any independent action on Eng- 
land 's part, as such consent would practically give to Eng- 
land the supremacy in Egypt which she had lost by the 
establishment of the dual control. It appeared, therefore, 
at first, that nothing could be done by England without 
the active co-operation of France. This view was support- 
ed on January 8 by the presentation of an identical note 
from the British and French Governments addressed to the 
Khedive, in which the two powers expressed their deter- 
mination ** to ward off by their united efforts all causes of 
external or internal complications which might menace the 
regime established in Egypt. '' This was ^practically an 
announcement that the two Powers were determined to sup- 
port the existing dual control and the position of the Khe- 
dive. But the menace — for it must be looked upon as a 
menace — was disregarded, if not defied, by the Chamber of 
I^'otables. On January 18 the Chamber claimed the right 
of regulating the national Budget. The controllers object- 
ed, but the Chamber held firm. The National party were 
with them; the Sultan, jealous of European interference 
in his suzerainty of Misr, was with them; perhaps, too, 
they knew that the difficulty of getting France and Eng- 
land fo agree to any joint action was also with them. 
•Cherif Pasha resigned, des23airing of finding a middle road 
of conciliation. The Khedive left the formation of a new 
Ministry to the Chamber. The administration was under 
"the nominal rule of Mahmoud Sani}^, surnamed el Baroudi, 
the powder-maker. It was really under the control of 
Arabi, who immediately became War ^nister. The tone 
adopted by the new Ministry was almost aggressively de- 
fiant to the control; and France, as represented by M. 
Oambetta, was eager in urging upon England some joint 
action to su23port the old order which was crumbling away 
•so rapidly. But while England was hesitating, unable to. 
make up its mind whether Arabi and his followers were 
really leading a National party, and ought therefore to be 
put clown by the strong arm or no, one of the frequent 
ministerial changes took place in France, and, by a sudden 
alteration in her foreign policy, deprived her of the oppor- 
tunity of retaining her hold upon the destinies of Egypt. 
M. Gambetta fell from power, and was succeeded by M. de 
Freycinet, who was as much opposed to active interference 
in Egypt as M. Gambetta was in favor of it. Arabi and 



EKGLAKD UKDER GLADSTOKE. 225 

his followers were not slow to perceiye the advantage which 
the disunion between France and England gave to them; 
they continued to assert their right to settle the Budget; 
the controllers continued to protest to the Khedive, and to 
their Governments, against this change, which would un- 
doubtedly alter very greatly the position of the two powers 
in Egypt. Another joint note was addressed to the Khe- 
dive, but nothing came of it. M. de Blignieres, finding, 
it may be, his position untenable, resigned his post. Arabi 
Bey was made a Pasha. The representatives of the 
National party were loud in their complaints against the 
control, and against the great number of foreign officials 
who were settled upon the country. 

Arabi Pasha now appeared to be master of the situation. 
It is evident that he thought himself so, but it is not quite 
easy to understand the course which he took. Erom this 
period he acted as if it were certain either that England 
would not have the courage to interfere, or would be pre- 
vented by other foreign Powers; or, if she did interfere, 
could be easily coped with by the Egyptian army. In Apjil, 
a plot on the part of certain Circassian officers in the army 
to murder Arabi was discovered, or said to be discovered. 
Some thirty-one Circassian officers were arrested on the 
charge of desiring to overthrow both Tewfik and Arabi, 
and restore Ismail Pasha, were tried in secret, and con- 
demned to degradation and exile for life. The Khedive, 
acting on the advice of Sir Edward Malet, refused to sign 
the decrees of the courts. Mahmoud el Baroudi hinted 
that the Khedive's refusal would be answered by massacres 
of foreigners, but denied the threats when called upon for 
explanation by the representatives of England and Erance. 
English and French iron-clads were at once ordered to Alex- 
andria. The English and French consuls urged that Arabi 
and his immediate allies should be compelled to quit the 
country. Arabi, who had been making terms with the 
sheiks of the Bedouins, refused, and he and his Ministry 
tendered their resignations. Tewfik accepted the resigna- 
tions, and attempted, unsuccessfully, to form a new Minis- 
try. The Army, as represented by Toulbah Pasha, an- 
nounced that it refused to obey the joint note, and would 
only recognize the authority of the Porte. 

For the first time, perhaps, it became evident that the 
situation was indeed dangerous. Alexandria was being 

8 



22G ENGLAND UNDEK GLADSTONE. 

rapidly fortified. The greatest alarm now existed among 
the European inhabitants of both Cairo and Alexandria, 
where menaces of massacre were not infrequent. Mr. 
Cookson, the English consul in Alexandria, wrote home 
warning the Government that there was danger of blood- 
shed in Alexandria, as the Egyptian soldiery were being 
stimulated against the European inhabitants. The arrival 
of Dervish Pasha from Constantinople as Turkish commis- 
sioner produced no pacifying effect. It may be assumed that 
Arabi himself could have had no interest whatever in any 
massacre of Europeans. From the merest motives of policy, 
such action could in no way further his hopes, or better his 
position. But in a town like Alexandria, with a consider- 
able European pojDulation filled with a not unreasonable 
alarm, and a native population stirred to the wildest ex- 
citement by the condition of afl'airs and the inflammatory 
cries of the native Press, some sort of collision was j)erhaps 
inevitable. Given panic on one side, and suspicion, hate, 
and anger on the other, some explosion was almost unavoid- 
able. On June 11 the crisis came. It is iDractically im- 
possible now to know the exact beginning of the riot which 
broke out, or who struck the first blow and fired the first 
shot. The disturbance began somehow in some quarrel be- 
tween the natives and .Europeans; a good many people, in- 
cluding French and English subjects, were killed, and our 
consul, Mr. Cookson, was dragged from his carriage, 
seriously hurt, and narrowly escaped with his life. The 
immediate result of this was a general flight of Europeans 
from Cairo and Alexandria. Every train from Cairo was 
loaded with Europeans hurrying from what they regarded 
as a doomed city; every shij) tliat sailed from Alexandrians 
harbor was crowded with refugees eager to save their lives 
at the expense of their property. 

Diplomacy was still struggling on. A conference of 
European Powers at Constantinople had been proposed, 
and the proposition had come to nothing. The British 
Government, even after the riot of June 11, were unwilling 
to land troops, though they announced that they would 
protect Tewfik's life and position against Halim Pasha or 
any other pretender favored by Arabi Pasha. The Khe- 
dive and Dervish Pasha had by this time left Cairo and 
come to Alexandria, where the Khedive set up his court. 
Here the influence of Germany and Austria seemed to be 



ENGLAND UNDEE GLADSTONE. 227 

in the ascendant. In obedience to the advice of the Con- 
suls-General of these two Powers, Raghed Pasha was in- 
trusted with the formation of a Ministry in which Arabi 
Pasha was once more War Minister. The patronage of the 
Porte was ostentatiously bestowed upon Arabi; he was 
decorated with the Order of the Medjidie. His defiance of 
England and France increased; the defenses of Alexandria, 
which had been abandoned for a time, were resumed and 
pushed on with great rapidity. Up to this point the great 
aim of the British Ministry appeared to be to keep well in 
accord with France, and to influence Egypt by the com- 
bined weight of a European concert. Now, however, quite 
suddenly, they resolved to act alone. Admiral Sir Beau- 
champ Seymour was ordered to forbid the progress of the 
Alexandrian fortifications; and when Sir Beauchamp Sey- 
mour's orders produced no effect, he was ordered by tele- 
gram on July 10 to give notice that, unless the forts com- 
manding the harbor were surrendered for the purpose of 
being disarmed, the English fleet would commence action. 
Up to that moment the influence of the Turkish Govern- 
ment appeared to have been chiefly devoted to retarding 
any solution of the difficulty. But when the British Ad- 
miral delivered his ultimatum to the military commander, 
Turkey made one final appeal for more time. Give but 
twenty four-hours more, and all should yet be well. Those 
twenty-four hours were never obtained. Most of the 
European subjects had by this time got safely out of Alex- 
andria, on every vessel that could take them. At night-fall 
on July 10 the British fleet withdrew from the inner har- 
bor to take up its position. The French fleet showed its 
determination to take no share in the work by steaming 
away to Port Said. The British fleet consisted of eight 
iron-clads and five gunboats, with a total force of 3539 men 
and 102 guns. 

At seven in the morning of July 11 the fight began. A 
shot was fired from one of the British ships, and was at 
once replied to from the Egyptian forts. Tiie fight was 
liot of long duration, nor was its result for a moment doubt- 
ful. The Egyptians certainly handled their guns better 
than was expected. Some idea of the popularity of Arabi 
with the people may be learned from the fact that women 
and even children could be perceived by glasses from the 
ships to be serving the guns against the fleet. By evening^ 



228 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

however, all the forts were silenced, and in many cases had 
been entered by spiking parties. The bombardment began 
again on the morning of Jnly 12, as no message of sur- 
render had come from Alexandria. After a few shots a 
flag of truce was hoisted in the town, whereupon an envoy 
was sent from Admiral Seymour to demand the immediate 
surrender of the forts at the entrance of the harbor before 
any negotiations were entered into. Toulbah Pasha, who 
received the British envoy, declared that he could not do 
this without the Khedive ^s sanction.. A truce mitil half 
past three o'clock was agreed to, but no reply coming from 
the town when the time had expired, firing Avas commenced 
again. Another flag of truce was immediately seen flying 
from the town, and once again the Admiral sent an envoy, 
who returned with the nevv^s that under cover of the flags 
of truce Arabi and his troops had abandoned the entire line 
of fortifications, and that the city was in a state of the 
wildest confusion and anarchy. 

It was singularly unfortunate that the Admiral had to 
begin the bombardment without having a sufficient force 
to occupy the town as soon as the forts were silenced and 
abandoned. The result was that for two days Alexandria 
was left to the mercy of the mob, and plunder, murder, 
and arson raged through the city. The city was fired in 
several places; houses were broken into and plundered; 
and upward of 2000 Europeans, chiefly Levantines, were 
massacred. The beautiful city, with its great square in 
which Mehemet Ali rode in bronze, its stately houses and 
handsome gardens, its crowded, busy streets, its palaces and 
bazaars, was all a ruin, smoking, smoldering, blood-stained. 
A new Isaiah would have found melancholy subject to be- 
wail the burden of Egjrpt in this new *' City of Destruc- 
tion.^' Every battle of the warrior is, indeed, '* with con- 
fused noise and garments rolled in blood,'' but this was 
with " burning and fuel of fire." 

At length, when the condition of the city became fully 
known to the fleet, the Admiral consented to land blue- 
jackets and marines, who lost no time in suppressing with 
sharp sternness all the burning and plundering that was 
going on. All offenders caught in the act of robbing were 
shot on the spot; others implicated in the outrages were 
promptly conveyed to prison to await more formal trial. 
Order was restored; the city was patroled; the Khedive 



EN'GLAISrD UNDER GLADSTONE. 229 

was escorted back from Ramleh to Ras-el-Tiu, and guard- 
ed by a force of 700 marines. The position of the Khedive 
during the bombardment had not been agreeable. He had 
retired from Alexandria to his palace at Ramleh as soon as 
the firing began. Ramleh is a pretty part of the country, 
about four miles outside Alexandria. Here he would seem, as 
far as can be ascertained from the confused and contra- 
dictory accounts, to have been practically a prisoner. It 
was said that he was in fear of his life; that on the day 
when Arabi retired from the fortifications, Arabi sent 
down some 500 men to Ramleh with instructions to kill 
the Khedive. Some of those about the Khedive were 
eager, so the story goes, to resist by force the new-comers, 
but the Khedive deprecated all violence. He dissuaded 
his bellicose companion. Dervish Pasha, from carrying out 
his intention of shooting down the leader of the five hun- 
dred as a rebel and traitor. Tewfik advocated more diplo- 
matic measures. There chanced to be in the Ramleh Pal- 
ace a considerable quantity of Turkish orders of various 
grades and degrees, which Dervish Pasha had brought 
with him from Constantinople. By lavish distribution of 
these orders^ and by ready promises of money, the Khedive 
succeeded in winning over first the officers and finally the 
men of the 500 who had been sent to kill him. It is fur- 
ther told that after he had thus bought off his would-be- 
murderers, he lulled the susjoicions of Arabi by telegraph- 
ing to him that he was Coming to Cairo, and so gained 
time until the entry of the English and the presence of the 
700 blue-jackets secured his safety at Ras-el-Tin. How far 
this story is accurate there is no means of knowing. It 
does not seem very likely that Arabi, having failed in his 
first effort to hold Alexandria against the British, would 
deliberately try to ruin his cause and himself in the eyes of 
Europe by the purposeless murder of the Khedive. His 
own safety, and the principles of Egyptian liberty for 
which he professed to be fighting, would alike be endan- 
gered by such crimes as sanctioning the destruction of 
Alexandria, the massacre of Europeans, and aiming at 
Tewfik's life. Without offering any opinion on the com- 
plicity or non-complicity of Arabi in these crimes, it may 
at least be said that if he was implicated in the massacres 
and the attempted murder of the Khedive, then the re- 
markable a,bility and statesman-like qualities^, of which hQ 



230 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

had shown himself to be possessed up to the time of the 
retirement from Alexandria, would seem to have com- 
pletely deserted him at the moment he needed them most. 
Alexandria was now nominally in our possession; but no 
time was to be lost in pouring in re-enforcements of troops 
to make good our hold, and to, as the phrase went, assist 
the Khedive in putting down his rebels. The term rebels 
seems curiously misap2)lied to the soldiery who were with 
Arabi. They were the Khedive^s soldiers; all the Khe- 
divial army was wi^h Arabi; up to the very last moment 
the Khedive had been, nominally at least, acting in concert 
with Arabi. At no time had Tewfik made any application 
to the British or French fleets to come to his assistance in 
any way. It must be admitted that our action in conquer- 
ing Egypt for the Khedive had in it something of the quib- 
bling spirit which inspired CromwelFs Ironsides to declare 
that they were fighting for the king. The Khedive had 
made no appeal to us for aid; ujj to the moment when we 
sent our first shot against the low line of Alexandrian forts, 
he and Arabi were outwardly in complete accord. It 
would seem as if some subtle spirit of intuition, almost 
akin to the supernatural, had made the Government ac- 
quainted with the moving of the Khedivial mind, and had 
told them at what jDarticular moment the whole Egyptian 
army had ceased to be the soldiers of the Khedive and had 
become rebels. However, it had been settled in some mys- 
terious way to the satisfaction of the Ministry, firstly, that 
the followers of Arabi were rebels against the Khedive; 
and, secondly, that it was England^ s duty to assist the Khe- 
dive agamst these rebels with British ships and British 
bayonets. Troops were poured into Alexandria, where Sir 
Garnet Wolsely himseK soon arrived to command the 
operations. The result of the struggle, never doubtful, 
was not long delayed. The safety of the canal was fortu- 
nately secured. The English troops marched out against 
Arabi; the decisive battle took place before Arabics in- 
trenched position at Tel-el-Kebir. With Sir Garnet were 
some 11,000 bayonets, 2000 sabres, and 60 guns. There 
were no means of precisely estimating the strength of the 
Egyptians intrenched behind Arabics earth-works, but they 
greatly outnumbered the attacking force. At about half 
past one on the morning of September 13 the British ad-. 
vance began. Just as dawn was beginning to show, the 



EKGLAKD UNDEK GLADSTONE. 231 

van came upon the Egyptian intrenchments. The Egyp- 
tians^ taken completely by surprise^ opened a desultory 
fire, hut could not stop the rush of the assailants. The 
British charged with the bayonet, and carried the first line 
of defenses at a rush. The Egyptians fought desperately 
enough, but never ralhed from the effect of the first wild 
charge of the British, In twenty minutes the right and 
left of x\rabi^s position were in the hands of the assailants; 
in little more than half an hour the Egyptian army was 
hopelessly disorganized and in full retreat, and Tel-el- 
Kebir was won. Without delay the main strength of the 
cavalry and mounted infantry struck out across the desert 
for Cairo. There is something really heroic in the story 
of this forced march, and of the appearance of the wearied 
troopers under the walls of Cairo. A handful of travel- 
stained men, tired with fighting and forced marching, drew 
rein before a city full of troops, and called upon it to sur- 
render. Like the knights-errant of the old tales of chiv- 
alry, these Amadisesin jack-boots ordered the city to yield, 
and it obeyed their summons. Had any resistance been 
made there wer3 soldiers enough in Cairo to annihilate the 
little band of British who rode triumphantly into the town 
and received the sword of Arabi. The next day Sir Gar- 
net AVolseley with more troops entered Cairo. The war 
was over, Arabi was a prisoner. 

It was not a victory to make much of a work about. 
Nobody expected that the Egyptian levies would fight as 
the Afghans or the Sepoy mutineers fought. But every 
credit is due to Sir Garnet Wolseley for the manner in 
which he accomplished his task. The war was not a great 
war, bat it presented many difficulties and dangers, all ef 
which Sir Garnet Wolseley had practically surmounted be- 
fore he landed in Alexandria. He had surveyed the situa- 
tion, had decided where he would fight, and fixed the 
length of the campaign before he left for the scene of war, 
and everything fell out as he had expected. The place, 
the time he had specified, were fulfilled to the letter. Peo- 
ple who delight in diminishing, or in trying to diminish, 
the reputation of a great man, are fond of calling Sir Gar- 
net Wolseley a lucky soldier. What they call luck is mili- 
tary genius. Mere luck never yet made a warrior 
* ^ f amoused for fight.~^^ The mind which can arrange be- 
forehand all the details of a campaign, can say where and 



2H2 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

when the decisive blow shall be struck, is a mind of the 
highest order in the soldier's craft. 

After the fall of Cairo the rest was easy. The other 
strongholds of insurrection surrendered. The re-embarka- 
tion of British troops at once began, some ten thousand 
men being, in Sir Garnet's opinion, a suiJicient force to 
keep the country in order. Baker Pasha, who had hurried 
from Constantinople for the purpose, was intrusted with 
the formation of a gendarmerie. The Khedive and a new 
Ministry, with Cherif Pasha at the head, returned to 
Cairo. The trials of the prisoners began at once. At 
first the advisers of the Khedive were eager to try and 
punish their enemies as quietly and as quickly as possible. 
But in England and in £uroi)e there was little faith imt in 
Egyptian methods of jn'ocedure with fallen foes. The hos- 
tility to Arabi in England had subsided the moment after 
his defeat, and all parties in England were determined to 
secure him a fair trial. Arabi was defended by Mr. Broad- 
ley, into whose hands Arabi intrusted various important 
documents. There were no startling ]"evelations at the 
trial, liowever, which was finally brought to a conclusion 
by what looked like an ingenious arrangement between the 
English and Egyptian Governments. Arabi pleaded guilty 
of reljelliou, and was sentenced to death. Tlie sentence 
was immediately commuted by the Khedive to perpetual 
exile, and Arabi, with a few of his fellow-rebels, went to 
Ceylon, after giving his parole of honor to the British Gov- 
,ernment that he would not make any attempt to withdraw 
from his place of exile. There Mr. Hemy W. Lucy saw 
him not long since, when he stopped at Ceylon on his way 
round the world. Mr. Lucy found Arabi apparently con- 
tented, learning English, very grateful to his English 
friends, and waiting upon "' Kismet,'' which may bring 
him back to Egypt and to authority again, one of these 
days. 

The Egyptian war was the direct cause of the death of 
one of the most brilliant and most profound of English 
Oriental scholars. Professor Edward Palmer was one of 
those rare men Avho possess what ap2)ears to be an almost 
incredible facility for learning languages. He was well- 
nigh the ideal scholar, devoted to learning for learning's 
sake, yet never tainted by the faintest tinge of pedantry, 
pride, or affectation. The story of ]iis life ]ias been told 



ENGLAND UNDEE GLADSTOKE. 233 

by his close friend, attached admirer, and literary col- 
league, the well-known novelist, Mr. Walter Besant. It is 
a touching and a thrilling record of marvelous accom- 
plishments, of brilliant performance, of patient, determined 
struggle toward success, of success achieved, of honors 
won, of firm friendships, and a peaceful, happy home — ■ 
and all ended by a sudden, terrible death in the Wady 
8udr. In the summer of 1882, Professor Palmer agreed 
to go out for the Government to Egypt to prevent any alli- 
ance between Arabi and the Bedouin tribes of the desert. 
It seems strange that so precious a life should have been 
risked on such an errand, though Professor Palmer^s 
knowledge of the languages of the East was proverbial. It 
is not very surprising that when he and his party were 
captured by hostile Arabs their doom should be death. It 
is certain that short work would have been made of any 
emissary from Arabi who was caught attemj)ting to inter-*^^ 
fere with the relations existing between some English 
general and, say, an Indian regiment. We shall, perhaps, 
never exactly know the story of the tragedy near Nakl. It 
is certain, liowever, that Palmer and his companions were 
captured, through the treachery of the Sheik Meter Sofieh, 
who was their guide, and that Palmer, Captain Gill, and 
Lieutenant Oharrington were shot. Some thirteen of the 
Arabs of the tribe that killed Palmer and his companions 
were afterward captured, brought to trial, and fi.ve of them 
were hanged at Zagazig on Eebruary 28, 1883. The 
remains of Palmer, Gill, and Oharrington were recovered, 
carried to England, and interred in St. PauFs Church. 

The death-roll of 1882 is studded with some famous 
nanfes, and many remarkable names. On Aj^ril 9 died 
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, painter and poet, and one of the 
strongest infl.uences upon the painting and the poetry of 
his age. He, with a few others, Millais and Holm an Hunt 
among them, was the founder of the Pre-Raphaelite 
Brotherhood, which strove to break away from the hideous 
conventionalities of the art then existing, and to find fresh 
inspiration in the works of ihe greater Florentines, and in 
a closer and truer aj)preciation of nature. As a school the 
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood did not last very long. It was 
short-lived, like the magazine, the " Germ,"' in which its 
founders sought to express their pictorial and literary theo- 
ries, and whose few numbers are now among the mo«t 



234 ElfGLAXD UXDER GLADST01?T]. 

precious of a modern book-lover^ s possessions. Each of 
the brethren went liis own wild way, whither that led him. 
One it led to long wanderings in the East, and to the crea- 
tion of pictures with religious subjects treated from the 
standpoint of the Syria of to-day. Another sought popu- 
larity and success, and found it, and was, perhaps, content. 
Dante Rossetti went on as he had begun, living for the two 
arts, in certain phases of each of which he was so consum- 
mate a master. With the big, bustling, struggling world 
about him he had little or nothing to do. He had no need 
for travel to stir his imagination. Much as he loved his 
mother Italy, much as he cherished that loveliest of all 
books of love, the '' Vita ISTuova,'"' much as his fancy de- 
lighted to live with Dante and Beatrice, he never, we 
believe, visited Italy, never saw the flower-city of his 
dreams and of his pictures. ISTor did he ever covet society 
or the voices of society, its praise or its patronage. He 
lived his own life in his own way. He painted his sad, 
beautiful faces, and clad his wonderful witch-women in ex- 
quisite harmonies and subtle contrasts of color, till the 
sense ached at their strange, luxurious loveliness; he wrote 
his passionate, melancholy sonnets, which enshrine and 
embalm the emotions of a soul born out of its time, or the 
tragic, fantastic ballads, in which the spirit of a dei^arted 
time lives like a rekindled flame, and held aloof from the 
noisy world, and was proud and patient and unhajDpy. 
When his young wife, the wife of his youth and his love, 
died, he had laid the manuscript of his poems in her coffin 
and they were buried under the earth. Years after, the 
entreaties of friends persuaded him to disentomb his 
poems, and tliey were given to the world, and the world 
made much of them both in praise and blame. Their in- 
fluence upon contemporary poetry and contemporary 
thought was profound. Many years after, shortly before 
his death, Mr. Rossetti brought out a fresh volume of • 
poems, only less beautiful tban the first because it was not 
the first. It showed no sign of changed mood or method; 
it was not an advance, as it was not a fallnig off, from the 
earlier volume. We may rest assured that Dante Rossetti ^s 
too early death has not at least been injurious to his fame 
as a poet. He had given the world his best. 

In the same month, ten days later, Charles Robert Dar- 
win died, greatest of the naturalists of his epoch., the found- 



EKGLAND UNDER GLADST03!?'E. 235 

er of the modern scientific school. It matters little to his 
fame that the so-called Darwinian theory was in some 
measure anticipated theoretically by others, by Oken of 
Jena, and by Goethe. Darwin devoted to the principle a 
laborious life-time in research. The problem on which he 
worked may have been guessed at by a great poet, or dimly 
conceived of by a Privatdocent of Gottingen, but ^ it was 
Darwin who carried out the problem, who traced it to its 
conclusions, who made it his own by more than forty years 
of patient, unwearying study. He was buried in West- 
minster Abbey. Science, that had lost her oldest servant 
in Darwin, suffered much, a little later, by the loss of one 
of her youngest. Professor E. M. Balfour, one of the many 
victims annually off:ered up to the worship of Mont Blanc. 
Mr. Balfour was looked upon as one of the " coming men ^^ 
in science. He was just thirty years old. Mr. Stanley 
Jevons, who was drowned while bathing off St. Leonards 
in August, had earned a considerable position as a logician 
and political economist. He owed his success in life large- 
ly to Mr. MilFs generous recognition of his ability* as a 
young man, and it was regrettable that he should have de- 
voted much of the latter part of his life to a futile and un- 
grateful attempt to lower MilPs reputation as a thinker 
and a philosopher. 

Literature and art lost Harrison Ainsworth, whose stories 
have been the delight of generations of school-boys, and of 
more than school-boys; Denis Florence McCarthy, the Irish 
patriotic poet, the translator of '^ Oalderon "; Mr. W. B. 
Eands, essayist and author of " Liliput Levee, ^^ a dainty 
book of child-lyrics; Mr. James Eice, Mr. Besant^s colleague 
in a whole series of popular novels; Dr. John Brown, the 
sweet-spirited author of '' Horae Subsecivse,^^ and of " Eab 
and his Friends;''^ Hablot Knight Browne, the once fa- 
mous, lately somewhat forgotten, " Phiz;^^ John Linnell, 
the landscape painter; Cecil Lawson, a young landscape 
painter of brilliant promise and brilliant performance; and 
Benjamin Webster, the actor. The deaths of Longfellow 
and Emerson in America were equally regretted on both 
shores of the Atlantic. With Dr. Pusey died the founder 
of the school of ecclesiastical thought which, advancing 
from the circle of the Church of England, paused half-way 
upon the journey toward the Church of Eome. 

In December Mr. Anthony Trollope died, at the age of 



2^(\ ENGLAND tJNDER GLADSTONE. 

sixty-seven. He has left ou record in his autobiography, 
published after his death, the method of working at his 
novels, and the somewhat formal and mathematical regu- 
larity of his method has left its mark upon the character of 
his books. -Mr. Trollope made sometliing like an effort to 
do for English society Avhat Balzac did for French in his 
** Human Comedy/' Some of his characters, Planty Pal- 
liser and others, permeate a whole series of his stories, as 
Rastignac and Maxime de Traill do those of the French 
novelist. But Mr. TrolloiDC had not the genius though he 
almost rivaled the fecundity of Balzac; and while Balzac's 
novels have already become classics, it is not jjrobable that 
Mr. Trollope' s novels will occupy any enduring place in 
literature. In the telling of a story, which after all is 
one of the first purposes of fiction, from the days of the 
Sindbad Nameh or the " Thousand and One Nights" to 
those of M. Fortune du Boisgobey, he Avas not, except in 
one or two instances, very successful. It is on his study of 
character that his fame Avill rest; he was the apostle of the 
commonplace, but he was occasionally something more than 
commonplace. There are some at least who think that 
" Nina Balatka" and " Linda Tressel," two of his least 
known stories, are worth all the " Chronicles of Barset " 
put together. 

The political world dropped a link with the past in the 
death of Sir George Grey. For many years he had played 
no part in public life. Nor was the part he played in 
former days a very great one. His name is most likely to 
be remembered in connection with the measure passed in 
1857, which abolished transportation The Tory party lost 
one of its ablest lawyers by the death of Sir John Holker 
in May. Mr. Bernal Osborne was chiefly conspicuous for 
his remarkable power of saying bitter things, and the im- 
partiality with which he exercised the power. One of his 
latest and bitterest sayings was occasioned by the death of 
Lord Beaconsfield. The length of time during which Lord 
Beaconsfield lingered offered Mr. Bernal Osborne an oppor- 
tunity which he could not miss. '* Overdoing it as he did 
everything," was his kindly comment on the dying states- 
man. The death of Mr. Edwin James reminded London 
for a moment of what once promised to be a successful 
political and legal career. He first became prominent by 
his skillful defense of Dr. Bernard in the Orsini business of 



EKOLAXD UKDEIi GLADSTOKE. 237 

1858, and lie shortly after entered Parliament. His talents 
had almost won for him the position of Solic^or-General, 
when money difficulties caused him to quit England and 
go to America, where he made some way at the American 
Bar. He returned to London in later years to find himself 
almost forgotten, and to fail in the attempt to make a new 
career for himself. Captain Hans Busk, the inventor of 
the Volunteer movement; Sir Henry Cole, inventor of the 
South Kensington Museum; and Joseph Aloysius Hansom, 
who intented the Hansom cab, died in this year. 

During the summer of 1882 London was delighted by the 
presence of a curious guest. London is made as happy as 
ever old Eome was by the visit of some barbaric or semi- 
barbaric sovereign. It forgot its horror of the Cretan 
massacres in its eagerness to welcome the ill-fated Abdul 
Aziz; it went wild over the Shah of Persia and other Orient- 
al potentates. Now it was rejoicing over the Zulu king, 
Cetewayo. Oetewayo, after being dethroned and kept in 
long confinement, was brought on a visit to England and 
intrusted to the care of Mr. Whiteley, the world-renowned 
'^ universal provider,"^ Avho has given an amusing account 
of his experiences in providing for an African monarch. 
Cetewayo, with some of his companions, was installed in 
an " aesthetic '^ red brick house in Melbury Eoad, where 
he was fed on ove*rdone beefsteak, where he drank large 
quantities of champagne, and where he received endless 
visitors who came to pay their respects and to converse 
with him through the medium of his interpreter, Mr. 
Shepstone, Sir Theophilus Shepstone^s son. After a while 
London got tired of Cetewayo; it was felt that he had been 
sufficiently impressed by the greatness of the British Em- 
pire, and by the charms of Mr. Whiteley^ s champagne, and 
he was sent back to Africa, and for a time restored to his 
dominion. He soon got into war with another chief and 
was defeated; it was reported that he was killed. The 
rumor of his death proved to be unfounded just then. He 
gave himself up to English authority again, and died not 
long after — of heart disease, it was said. Possibly succes- 
sive disappointments, and an inability to understand the 
policy of the Government, had something to do with the 
ill-starred king^s decease. 



2o8 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

TROUBLE AT HOME AND ABROAD. 

The new year 1883 opened sadly enough. The sorrow 
was more another nation's than ours^ yet it had its echo 
here. The man who had died in France, just as the old 
year was fading into the new, had begun to play a great 
part in history, and his influence had counted for some- 
thing in the politics of England. All over London, on the 
Monday which was the first day of the year, the placards 
of the evening papers announced that M. Gambetta was 
dead. He had been ill some time, through a mysterious 
accident, with regard to which many vague and meaning- 
less rumors were in circulation, as such rumors always cir- 
culate when a great statesman is struck down. He had 
somehow wounded himself with a pistol; the wound was 
slight in itself, but Gambetta's health was bad, and sud- 
denly, almost before people were aware that he was in 
serioiis danger, he was dead. Seldom, perhaps, has the 
irony of existence, the vanity of success, been more grimly 
accentuated. Gambetta was on the threshold of a great 
career; he was already the greatest statesman in France, 
the one man in whom people recognized a spirit that was 
not unworthy to cope with that of the German Chancellor. 
He had become almost suddenly famous in France. The 
war gave him his ojoportunity to show himself a soldier, a 
statesman, and an orator. He seemed to be walking with 
a sure tread to the highest successes that a political life 
ca7i dream after and attain. He had the rare gift of 
patience; he knew how to wait. He was content, if needs 
were, to stand aside and watch the play, quietly confident 
that when his cue came he could strike in again and fill 
the stage with his j^resence, and cause all the other actors 
to be forgotten. And now, long before the play was played 
out, while it was but beginning, the great actor was gone. 
The effect was strange, startling, even ghastly. The drama 
has been going on, and the audience have been applauding; 
in scene after scene the actor has appeared and been suc- 
cessful, and suddenly, while all are looking for greater 
things yet, the curtain is rung down, and we are told that 



EE^GLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 339 

the great actor lias died while waiting to come on the stage. 
He is dead, and the play will never be finished. 

M. Gambetta had many bitter enemies. The bitterest 
of them might be willing to admit that there was some- 
thing profoundly melancholy, something inexpressibly 
tragic, m that swift, untimely, meaningless conclusion to a 
great career. If life were, indeed, in the words of Mr. 
George Meredith, '^'^ a suj)reme ironic ^^I'ocession, with 
laughter of gods in the background,"^ there might well be 
immortal mirth over such an ambition coming to such an 
end. M. Gambetta died at Ville d^Avray, a little country 
place not far from Paris, in the villa called " Les Jardies," 
which had once belonged to Balzac, and which had been a 
cause of much pride and much torment to the great French 
novelist. There was everything in the career of Gambetta 
to excite the admiration of the old master of " Les Jar- 
dies,"" and something in its futile farewell of which he, 
perhaps best of all men who have ever written, could have 
understood the pity and pathos. 

On February 10, 1883, the representatives of Germany, 
Austria, France, Italy, Eussia, Turkey, and Great Britain 
met at the Foreign Office, to hold a series of conferences 
respecting the navigation of the Danube. They had actual- 
ly met two days previously, but had adjourned out of 
compliment to the Turkish Embassador, Musurus Pasha, 
who had not then received the fidl powers enabling him 
to take part in the conference. The questions which the 
conference had to decide upon were not only of the highest 
international interest, but were of special importance to 
British commerce. By the Treaties of Paris of 1856 and 
1857 Russia- ceded to Turkey the whole of the islands at 
the mouth of the Danube, from the Belgarod, or most 
northern outlet of the Kilia branch, down to the St. George"s, 
or most southern mouth, with the addition of the Isle of 
Serpents. Thus every navigable outlet of the Danube 
into the sea passed from the control of Russia to that of 
the Porte. 

The contracting parties to the Treaty of Paris placed all 
matters connected with the improvement and navigation of 
the Danube under two Commissions. In the first, or 
European Commission, each of the contractmg parties was 
to be represented by a delegate, and the duties of the Com- 
mission were to put the mouth of the Danube into the 



240 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

best possible state for navigation, and to settle the fixed 
duties which should be levied to defray the expenses con- 
nected with these works. It was expected that this Com- 
mission would have completed its task in two years, and in 
the meantime a permanent Riverain Commission was to be 
formed of delegates from the various riverain states of the 
Danube, to whom the improvement of the river and the 
regulations of navigation throughout its entire course were 
to be intrusted. The Riverain Commission never acted. The 
European Commission was unable to accomplish its work in 
the proposed two years. The work it had to carry out proved 
to be of a much more serious character than was at first 
expected, and its existence was renewed from time to time 
by prolongations in 1866 of five years, and in 1871 of 
twelve years. Before this latter period of twelve years was 
little more than half expired, Russians victory over Turkey 
gave her the opportunity of eifacing the very last of the 
humiliations that had been inflicted upon her by the Crimean 
war. The forty-fifth article of the Treaty of Berlin com- 
pelled Roumania to restore to Russia the greater portion of 
the Bessarabian territory which Russia had lost by the Treaty 
of Paris in 185 6. Tlius all the Kilia mouths of the Danube, 
with the exception of that of Stary Stamboul, were com- 
j^rised within the Russian frontier. By the forty-sixth 
article the islands forming the Delta of the Danube, includ- 
ing the Isle of Serpents, were added to Roumania. By the 
fifty-third article Roumania, as an independent power, was 
granted a representative on the EurojDean Commission. 

The European Commission, through a committee of its 
members, drew up certain draft regulations for that portion 
of the river between the Iron Gate and Galatz, and recom- 
mended the formation of a permanent mixed Commission, 
consisting of representatives of Austria and of the riverain 
states of Roumania, Bulgaria, and Servia, to enforce these 
provisions. It was further proposed that the Austrian 
member, out of courtesy to a great Power, should be 2)resi- 
dent of this mixed Commission. These proposals met with 
many objections. Roumania was 023posed to the presence 
of any Austrian member on the Commission, Austria not 
being a riverain state. Bulgaria (objected to the jiresence 
of either Austrian or Roumai;iian members on the mixed 
Commission on the ground that these Powei's were already 
represented on the European Commission by ])crmaiiont 



ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 241 

'members. The French commissioner on the European 
Commission, M. Camille Barrere, then proposed that Aus- 
tria, Eoumania, Servia, and Bulgaria should each be rej)- 
resented on the mixed Commission, and that each of the 
members of the European Commission should serve on the 
mixed Commission successively for six months at a time, 
in the alphabetical order of the countries they represented. 
This proposition was eventually agreed to and signed by all 
the commissioners and delegates, with the exception of 
Koumania. The English Government, in the end of 1882, 
issued invitations to France, Germany, Austria, Italy, 
Russia, and Turkey, to assemble their representatives in 
conference at London, with a view to deciding upon the 
confirmation of these regulations, and the extension and 
prolongation of the powers of the EuroiDcan Commission. 
On this conference the riverain states who were especially 
interested were not represented at all. All that the pleni- 
potentiaries would concede to the riverain states was that 
representatives from Roumania and Servia might be ad- 
mitted to the conference with a consultative voice, and that 
the Bulgarian representatives might be present at the con- 
ference and hear all that was said, but would only be suf- 
fered to speak themselves through the mouth of the Turk- 
ish embassador. These concessions were naturally very 
galling to the pride of the riverain states, and. though 
Servia accepted them, both Roumania and Bulgaria re- 
fused, and declared that they would not be bound by any 
decisions that might be taken without their participation. 

In all this the riverain states, and Roumania especially, 
appear to have been somewhat roughly used by the great 
Powers. Prince Georges Bibesco, in his valuable book, 
'' Histoire d'une Frontiere; la Roumanie sur la rive droite 
du Danube, ^^ has given a very clear and fair account of the 
hard treatment Roumania had to undergo at the Congress 
of Berlin, where the independence conceded to her was cer- 
tainly made as bitter as possible by the conditions demand- 
ed and the concessions enforced. In. the question of the 
navigation of the Danube, she would certainly seem to be 
geographically entitled ts a voice in the matter; but at the 
London conference of 1883 her rights were ignored, or at 
least recognized in such a manner as made the recognition 
almost more humiliating than a direct refusal. Lord Gran- 
ville was very bland and very gracious, and if he suffered 



243 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

lioumania to be dealt witli at the pleasure of the great 
Powers, his attitude was polished and courteous. There 
was, undoubtedly, a considerable feeling of op230sition to 
the riverain states in this country. The Associated Cham- 
bers of Commerce, bodies of great influence, believed that 
the representatives of the riverain states on the ]3roposed 
permanent mixed Commission would endeavor to restrict 
the coasting trade of the upper portion of the river to their 
own vessels. As such a condition of things would be high- 
ly injurious to the trade and shi^^ping of this country, the 
Associated Chambers of Commerce had memorialized Lord 
Granville in the April of 1882, urging him to insure to 
English shij^ping all the rights and privileges it then en- 
joyed as regarded the free navigation of the Danube. 
Though it is by no means certain that Eoumania had any 
such intentions as were set forth in this appeal, the appeal 
would undoubtedly have great weight with Lord Gran- 
ville. 

The result of the conference was practically to gratify 
all the demands made by Russia. Russia carried her point 
about being allowed, in conjunction with Roumania, to 
have the free supervision of the Kilia branch, and con- 
stnicting in that branch and its embouchures works of a 
commercial nature for the purpose of improving the navi- 
gation. Russia, moreover, had the right to levy tolls m- 
tended to cover the expenses of any such works undertaken 
by her; in fact the principal result of the conference was 
to yield to Russia all the concessions she demanded, and 
to place Roumania very materially under Russian influence 
and Russian authority. The nature of the mixed Com- 
mission was agreed upon. The powers of the European 
Commission were extended to Ibraila. The powers of the 
European Commission were prolonged for a ]oeriod of 
twenty-one years; and on the expiration of this term it was 
further decided that the Commission should continue to 
exercise its functions for ^^eriods of three years, unless, 
one year before the * expiration of one of these terms of 
three years, any one of the Contracting Powers gave notice 
of a wish to propose modifications in the constitution or 
powers of the commission. A date of six months later 
than the conference was assigned for the exchange of the 
ratifications of this treaty, which accordingly took place at 
the end of August, 1883; 



1^]KCILAHI) UHDER GLADSTONE. 243 

Parliament opened on Thursday, February 15, 1883. The 
Queen's Speech expressed satisfaction at the settlement of 
the Egyptian struggle, announced that a conference of the 
great Powers had assembled in London to consider the 
questions relating to the navigation of the Danube, and 
pointed out the revival of disturbances in Zululand. Sev- 
eral measures of legislation were announced — for the codi- 
fication of the criminal law, for the establishment of a 
Court of Criminal Appeal, for the amendment and con- 
solidation of the laws relating to bankruptcy and patents, 
for preventing corrupt practices at elections, for perpetu- 
ating and amending the Ballot Act, for the better govern- 
ment of London, and for general reform in the local 
government of the country. Bills were also promised 
dealing with the conservancy of rivers and the prevention 
of floods, with the police and universities of Scotland, 
with education in Wales, and compensation to tenants for 
agricultural improvements in England and Scotland. The 
speech concluded with the hope that Parliament might be 
able to deal with some of the legislative wants of Ireland 
for which provision had not yet been made. 

In conformity with the habit of Parliament under the 
new administration, a long debate sprung up upon the ad- 
dress. People who objected to the policy of the Govern- 
ment in Egy23t and in Zululand, or who objected to other 
actions of the Government, or who wished to point out 
what the Government ought to do, expressed their opinions 
with sufficient copiousness. Mr. Gorst was the first to 
bring Ireland prominently forward by an ingenious amend- 
ment, expressing a hope that no further concessions would 
be made to lawless agitators in that country. This at once 
aroused ail the old Kilmainham-treaty excitement. In 
these debates Mr. Gibson and Mr. Plunket are always in 
their element. Like the great twin brethren who were 
always supposed to have a special eye to the safety of 
Rome, and to interfere in person where the fortunes of the 
'' JSTameless City " were going badly, Mr. Gibson and Mr. 
Plunket are ever in the van of the Conservative battle 
when an Irish question gives them the chance of showing 
that the Conservative party really have some of the old 
fighting spirit left in them. The Kilmainham treaty has 
been the greatest of blessings to these two gentlemen. 
The curious resemblances that exist between them increase 



244 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

their likeness to the Dioscuri, and lend a piquant. attrac- 
tion to any of their united attacks upon the Ministry ac- 
cused of unholy compact with the Third Party. Both rep- 
resent the same constituency, both are clever lawyers, both 
are exceptionally able speakers, both have peculiarly eight- 
eenth-century faces, both pride themselves on their gifts of 
satiric speech, both are endowed with a certain quality of 
theatrical display which enables them to make the very 
most of even the slightest rhetorical opportunity, both 
were law officers of the Crown under the late Administra- 
tion. 

But, just as Castor was not wholly like Pollux, or Pollux 
like Castor, so Mr. Gibson and Mr. Plunket have certain 
points of difference, which serve, perhaps, only to heighten 
the general similitude. Mr. Gibson is, perhaps, the harder 
hitter; Mr. Plunket the more poetically minded. Mr. 
Plunket is more showy than solid; Mr. Gibson more solid 
than showy. On this occasion both speakers were in full 
force. Mr. Gibson attacked everybody fiercely — the Gov- 
ernment, the Irish members, and especially Mr. Herbert 
Gladstone, who had made a speech at Leeds which stirred 
Mr. Gibson to a passion of indignation. The Dioscuri 
raised the Kilmainham ghost - again, showed that it ' had 
been neither laid nor exorcised by all the debates that had 
been devoted to it, and succeeded in bringing up Mr. 
Forster. Mr. Forster has a peculiar affection for the Kil- 
mainham-treaty tojDic. It allows him to figure, like Eogue 
Riderhood, as ^^ an honest man," and it enables him to 
gratify his sense of injury against the colleagues who did 
not properly appreciate his worth and his ability. Mr. 
Forster^s speech was a long attack upon Mr. Parnell, inter- 
rupted at one point not undramatically. Mr. Forster had 
used words which, wiiatever they were meant to convey, 
gave to their hearei-s the impression that he charged Mr. 
Parnell with conniving at murder. Mr. O^Kelly impetu- 
ously interrupted him by crynig out thrice, ''You lie!" 
and was immediately suspended. This debate took place 
on Thursday, the 22d, and the next day Mr. Parnell re- 
plied in a brief speech, in which he coldly repudiated Mr. 
Forster's insinuations. In the course of the debate, some 
ingenious use Avas made by Mr. Forster's opponents of 
former utterances of his own, and journalistic comments 
upon them. Mr. Forster had made a speech in March, 



1864, defending Mazzini as a man of high character, whose 
friend he should not be ashamed to be, as he was not 
ashamed to be his acquaintance. This declaration was 
made after long quotations had been read in the House 
from Mazzini^s letter on '^ The Theory of the Dagger/^ in 
which he had written, " Blessed be the knife of Palafox; 
blessed be, in your hands, every weapon that can de- 
stroy the enemy and set you tree/' ''^ The weapon that 
slew Mincovitch in the arsenal initiated the insurrection 
in Venice. It was a weapon of irregular warfare, like 
that which three months before the republic destroy- 
ed the Minister Rossi in Eome/^ These were the utter- 
ances of the man whom Mr. Forster considered of high 
character, whose friendship he would not repudiate. The 
quotation of these passages was appropriate. They were 
not brought forward to conyey the idea that Mr, Forster 
approved of political assassination; that, of course, would 
have been absurd. The intention was to show how easily 
such accusations are trumped up, and also how liable En- 
glish statesmen are to commend, or, at least to condone, 
principles of revolution in foreign states, which they view, 
and rightly view then, in a very different light when they 
are applied at home. The Kilmainham treaty was not 
heard the last of in this debate. It came up again and 
again. Whenever adventurous members of the Opposition 
had nothing better to do or to talk about they turned to 
the Kilmainham treaty, and made it the sempiternal text 
for attacks upon the Government. But no amount of in- 
dignant inquiries or pertinacious onslaughts succeeded in 
eliciting any further facts as to the alleged '^treaty." The 
Government had given its explanation, and declined to 
amplify it to suit the sensational and mysterious sugges- 
tions of an incredulous Opposition. 

Once more the Bradlaugh question came prominently ta 
the front. During the recess Mr. Bradlaugh had been 
going about the country addressing meetings, and had 
brought an unsuccessful action against the sergeant-at- 
arms for expelling him from the House. On the day when 
Parliament met a great meeting was held in Trafalgar 
Square to support Mr. Bradlaugh^s claims, at which Mr, 
Bradlaugh announced that unless the Government brought 
in some Bill that would allow him to affirm, he would 
take his seat as before. The Queen's Speech, as we^haye 



240 EKGLAKD UKDER GLADSTONE. 

seen, contained no reference to any Bill of the kind sug- 
gested . by Mr. Bradlaugh, but it was nevertheless noised 
abroad that the Government did propose to introduce 
legislation on the subject. In answer to an appeal from 
Mr. Labouchere, Lord Hartington announced that the 
Government intended to bring in a Parliamentary Oaths 
Amendment Bill, which would enable members objecting 
to the oath to affirm. In consequence of this pledge, 
which aroused promises of the fiercest opposition from the 
Conservative party, Mr. Bradlaugh consented to defer fur- 
ther action on his part until the fate of the measure was 
decided. The decision was not long delayed. Before it 
came Mr. Bradlaugh gained a victory over Mr. Newdegate 
after two years of litigation. Mr. Newdegate, in the per- 
son of his " man of straw, ^' named Clarke, had brought an 
action against Mr. Bradlaugh, to recover penalties for his 
having sat and voted without taking the oath. Mr. Clarke 
gained his case, and the verdict was supported by the 
Court of Appeal, but was reversed by the House of Lords 
on the ground that the right of action lay only with the 
Crown, and not with a common informer. Mr. Bradlaugh 's 
legal success was not ominous of like success in the Com- 
mons. The Conservatives kept their promise to offer to 
the Bill uncompromising opposition. Nor was opposition 
to the Bill confined to the Tory benches. 

Within the Liberal ranks some of the angriest opponents 
of the measure avowed themselves. On April 23 the sec- 
ond reading was moved by the Attorney-General. A bit- 
ter debate, prolonged over several days, came to an end on 
May 3. Shortly after midnight. the division was taken, 
amid a scene of excitement which recalled to many mem- 
bers the wild night in 1866 when Mr. Lowe and the Adul- 
lamites defeated a Reform Bill and overthrew a Govern- 
ment. Two hundred and eighty-nine members voted for 
the Affirmation Bill, 292 against it. The Government 
were defeated by a majority of 3. Defeat, was, indeed, 
inevitable. The forces allied for the moment against the 
measure were so strong that the smallness of the majority 
was more remarkable than the fact that there was a major- 
ity against the Government. But the Government declined 
to go out. Foreseeing the possibility of defeat from the 
beginning, they had taken care to make it known that they 
did not stake their existence on the fortunes of the Bill, 



ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 247 

They chose to regard it as a matter for the House to de- 
cide upon instead of a vital Ministerial measure^ and they 
remained in office. But the defeat was damaging none the 
less. Regarded by itself the Government could afford to 
neglect it, but it was a factor in the sum of troubles which 
was every day becoming more bewildering to the political 
arithmetic of the Administration. As soon as the Bill was 
defeated, Sir Stafford Northcote moved his familiar resolu- 
tion that Mr. Bradlaugh be not permitted to take the oath, 
and, after Mr. Bradlaugh was heard once more from the 
bar of the House in his own defense, the motion was car- 
ried, and the difficulty was shelved for another year. 

An attempt was unsuccessfully made to include Mr. 
Bradlaugh in a remarkable trial for blasphemy, which was 
conducted in February. This was the trial of the editor 
and publishers of a periodical called the ^^ Freethinker,^^ 
for the publication of a series of pictures described as a 
^' New Life of Christ, ^^ for which the editor, Mr. George 
William Foote, was sentenced to twelve months' imprison- 
ment. The trial aroused the greatest public interest, and 
many efforts were made to obtain a remission of the sen- 
tence by persons who believed that the law had been 
strained> and who considered that Mr. Foote, as a man of 
education and ability, had been harshly treated for what 
was, after all, only an exaggerated expression of opinion. 
But, without entering into the grave religious questions in- 
volved, it is surely obvious that human society would be- 
come intolerable if it were permissible for any one who 
pleased to insult publicly and coarsely the religion of the 
vast majority of his fellows. The illustrations complained 
of were disgusting and disgraceful; would have been dis- 
gusting and disgraceful if the Christians of England were 
but as ten for every thousand. It is scarcely conceivable 
that an educated man, as Mr. Foote undoubtedly was, 
could have believed that he was serving any cause by these 
monstrous caricatures of what even the bitterest unbelievers 
have agreed to regard with reverence — ^the life of Christ. 
At the expiration of the year Mr. Foote was released, and 
announced his intention of .seeking a seat in Parliament to 
protest against religious persecution. 

On April 2 Lord Randolph Churchill, judging that the 
time had come for him to take a yet more active part in poli- 
tics, addressed a manifesto to the City and the A^orld, The 



2'^8 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

manifesto took the form of a letter to the '' Times. " '' The 
Ijosition of the Conservative party/' wrote Lord Randolph, 
'''at present is hopeful and critical." " But, like the angry 
hive of bees in Warwick's simile, the Conservative party 
wanted a leader. Three names at once presented themselves 
to Lord Randolph's mind. '' If the electors are in a negative 
frame of mind they may accept Sir Stafford Northcote; if 
they are in a cautious frame of mind they may shelter them- 
selves under Lord Cairns; if they are in a English frame of 
mind they will rally round Lord Salisbury.'' Salisbury 
was, indeed, the burden of Lord Randolph's letter. '^ Hon- 
orai3le rescue and defense " for the Tory j)arty ^^ cried out 
upon the name of Salisbury," and, like Lewis of France, 
Lord RandoljDh appealed to renowned Salisbury to lift up 
his brow, and with a great heart heave away the inaction 
of j^arty due to the conduct of the ^^ Junta" of leaders of 
Opposition in the House of Commons. Lord Randolph 
was dismayed at the ^^ series of neglected opj^ortunities, 
2^usillanimity, combativeness at wrong moments, vacilla- 
tion, dread of responsibility, repression and discouragement 
of hard-working followers, collusions with the GoYernment, 
hankerings after coalitions, jealousies, commonplaces, and 
want of perception on the j)art of the former lieutenants of 
Lord Beaconsfield. " All this was due to the want of real 
leadership, and to the way in which the opportunities of 
the party were ^^ handled by third-rate statesmen, such as 
were good enough to fill subordinate offices while Lord 
Beaconsfield Y,'as alive." The Conservative party. Lord 
Randolph declared, was formed for better ends than '^ the 
short-lived triumph and S23eedy disgrace of 'bourgeois' 
placemen, Hionorable' Tad23oles, hungry Tapers, Irish 
lawyers." Lord Salisbury alone could retrieve the party; 
Jjord Salisbury alone could save the country. 

The country, it must be admitted, smiled a good- deal at 
1 jord Randolph's elf ort to save it, but it smiled good-humor- 
Bdly. There was something not displeasing in the cool 
audacity with which Lord Randolph postured as the Elisha 
of the mantle of Lord Beaconsfield, as the patron of the 
House of Cecil, and as the savior of his country, which dis- 
armed any feeling angrier than amused interest. The im- 
mediate followers and allies of Sir Stafford Northcote must 
be excepted from this sense of amused interest. They were 
annoyed, indignant, incoherent. Lord Salisbury himself 



EITGLAKD UKDER GLADST02!TE. M9 

did not appear to be greatly elated by Lord Eandolpb^'s 
homage. In the phraseology of childhood. Lord Randolph 
had spoken one word for Lord Salisbury, and tAvo for him- 
self. Lately, Lord Randolph Churchill and Lord Salisbury 
have almost parted company. It was easy to see, even 
then, that, under all the respectful reverence for the ^^ En- 
glish ^^ leadership of Lord Salisbury, Lord Randolph 
Churchill cherished the complacent conviction that the Tory 
party need not go to the Upper House to find the needed new 
leader. But the country is always good-humoredly tolerant 
of youthful ambition, even of youthful audacity. Lord Ran- 
dolph was evidently playing a part learned from the life of 
young Disraeli, and the country perhaps remembered that 
its merriment over the young Disraeli had not been particu- 
larly happy. At any rate, it recognized Lord Randolj^h^s 
right to prophesy, even while it made merry over his 
prophecies. Lord Randolph cared very little for the mirth 
of his ojoponents or his political allies. '' Laugh, but hear 
in.Q," he might have said, paraphrasing the well-worn 
classic story. He had been steadily advancing more and 
more into the ]3ublic view ever since the new Parliament; 
his letter made him. more conspicuous than ever. It pro- 
voked a counter-demonstration in favor of Sir Staff oM 
Northcote, in the shape of an address signed by two hun- 
dred members of the Conservative party, assuring him of 
their allegiance. It called down angry letters, which Lord 
Randolph Churchill took with great composure. In a 
second letter to the ''^ Times ^^ he expressed himself as 
'' only too happy to bear the brunt of a little temporary 
eifervescence, and to be the scapegoat on v/hich doomed 
mediocrities-might lay the burden of their exposed incapac- 
ity. " If Lord Salisbury declined to follow his advice, then 
it became his duty to save the party and the country him- 
self; and Lord Randolph promptly assumed for himself, 
with no timid hesitation, the position of Lord Beaconsfield's 
successor. 

Lord Salisbary made speeches in different parts of the 
country, attacking the Government; he even went to Bir- 
mingham to beard Radicalism by its own hearthstone. 
Birmingham Radicalism was not disposed to take this 
Tory invasion patiently. On March 30th, 1883, Mr. 
Chamberlain delivered a counterblast to Lord Salisbury. 
*^ Lord Salisbury surveys the Liberal policy with jaundiced 



250 EKOLANI) r.NDKIl GLADSTOKE. 

eyes, through glasses which are colored by temper and by 
prejudice. He exaggerates failures, he creates defects 
where he can not find them, he ignores altogether every- 
thing which is favorable and satisfactory, and, by deepen- 
ing the shadows and altering the light, produces a picture 
which is not a portrait, but a gross caricature. " What 
w^ould Lord Salisbury and his party have done with- Ire- 
land? '^ No remedial legislation; more bayonets; more 
police; the Irish leaders in jail; full rents for Irish land- 
lords, and eviction for Irish tenants. But that is a policy 
which has been tried for generations, and failed conspicu- 
ously. Force is no remedy for discontent. Our task will 
never be completed until we have succeeded, by just and 
equal laws, by wise administration, in enlisting on the side 
of the English Government and the English people the in- 
terest and the influence of the bulk of the Irish nation. " 
Then came the passage which made this speech one of the 
classics of the Administration by its uncompromising 
presentation of the position of the Radical party. '^ Lord 
Salisbury cares nothing for the bulk of i\\Q Irish nation. 
He has no sympathy for the poor tenants who for years, 
under the threat of eviction and the pressure of starvation, 
have paid the unjust rents levied on their improvements, 
and extorted from their desperate toil and hopeless pover- 
ty. I say that on this matter, as on many others. Lord 
Salisbury constitutes himself the spokesman of a class — of 
the class to which he himself belongs, ' who toil not, 
neither do they spin;^ whose fortunes, as in his case, have 
originated in grants made in times long gone by for the 
services which courtiers rendered kings, and have since 
grown and increased, while they have slejDt, by levying an 
unearned share on all that other men have done by toil and 
labor to add to the general wealth and prosperity of the 
country of which they form a part. '^ 

It is no exaggeration to say that this speech roused the 
greatest excitement throughout the country. Advanced 
Radicals hailed it as a declaration of war against a profit- 
less and costly aristocracy. Whigs and Conservatives, du- 
bious Liberals and desperate Tories, huddled together in 
the common union of angry panic. Erom the shores of 
the '^tideless, dolorous, midland sea,^' from the myrtle 
groves of Cannes, the Duke of Argyll wrote an indignant 
protest on behalf of his class against the utterances of the 



ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 251 

President of the Board of Trade. There was nothing of 
the rose-scented wind of Provence in the tone and temper 
of the Dukes's letter. It blew with the angry^, acrid breath 
of the mistral. The Duke of Argyll is nothing if he is not 
omniscient. He hurled portentous blocks of political econo- 
my at the Birmingham Trojan. He quoted Carlyle^ he 
quoted Lord Bacon, he alluded to the career of James Nas- 
myth, he volunteered the superfluous statement that he was 
not '^ SL Communist. ^^ All this was entertaining enough, 
but it can hardly have impressed Mr. Chamberlain very 
profoundly, or have caused the Radicals of Birmingham 
and elsewhere to veil abashed foreheads. It had, indeed, 
nothing to do with the matter in hand. Every one knew, 
of course, that the Duke of Argyll was not likely to con- 
sider a wealthy aristocracy a useless feature in a State sys- 
tem. What Mr. Chamberlain complained of was the heart- 
less indifference with which the chief champion of a wealthy 
and idle body had regarded the sufferings of some millions 
of less fortunate fellow-men. Nobody had accused, nobody 
could accuse, the Duke of Argyll of idleness. His activity 
might not be very profitable to the State, but it was un- 
doubted. He was always writing books or letters, and dis- 
playing the varied range of his acquirements, prompt at 
all times to enter the lists against Radicalism, ever ready 
to break a lance with progress, to defend the old order that 
was rapidly giving place to the new. 

On April 19 a bronze statue of Lord Beaconsfield was 
unveiled in Parliament Square, in the presence of Lord 
Salisbury, Sir Stafford Northcote, and a large number of 
Lord Beaconsfield's relations, friends,- and admirers. Among 
the friends was Sir John Pope Hennessy, one of Mr. Dis- 
raeli^s favorite lieutenants in former days. Sir John Pope 
Hennessy had just come from his old governorship of Hong 
Kong, and was making a brief stay in London before start- 
ing for his new governorship of Mauritius. When Sir John 
Hennessy was a young man making his way in Parliament, 
Mr. Disraeli, who always sought the alliance of young 
men of political promise^ manifested the warmest friend- 
ship and affection for him, and it was a curiously appro- 
priate chance which allowed him to be present at a ceremony 
in honor of his old friend and leader. 

In the second week of July, 1883, the Government found 
itself in a new difficulty, which threatened at one time tQ 



252 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

prove the most serious they had yet encountered. The 
Suez Canal had for some time been proving itself insuffi- 
cient to meet the increased demands made upon it as a 
water-way., and A'^arious suggestions were made from time to 
time for altording increased facilities of transit to the East. 
At one time there was some talk of a canal^ founded on 
Britisli capital, and worked by a British Company, being 
cut by Alexandria and Cairo. Nothing much Avas heard 
of this scheme. Then it became known that M. de Lesseps 
had a plan of his own for increasing the means of com- 
munication across the isthmus. M. de -Xesseps^s position 
was somewhat jieculiar. In 1856, M. Fei*dinand de Lesseps 
came to England with a great project for cutting a ship 
canal across the Isthmus of Suez. 

Any one who glances at a map will see 9t once what 
immense advantages to the commerce of the world, and 
especially to the commerce of England, such a canal, if 
really feasible, offered. The way to our Indian emj^ire, to 
our Australian colonies, instead of encircling the whole 
African continent, might be enormously abridged, by the 
proposed canal. Yet in England M. de Lesseps^s proposal 
was received with indifference, if not with contempt. It 
could not be made; if made, it could not possibly pay; if it 
did pay, and proved a success, it would be a serious danger 
to British interests. M. de Lesseps had an interview with 
Lord Palmerston, who regarded the scheme with whole- 
hearted hostility; and Lord Palmerston in his love and hate 
was always whole-hearted. M. de Lesseps was in no wise 
discouraged. He appealed to his own countrymen, and 
found that they were more easily impressed with the feasi- 
bility of the scheme than the engineering race of England. 
French patience, French energy, and French perseverance 
overcame all obstacles, and cut the canal. Then the En- 
glish people began to discover that they had made a great 
mistake. Lord Beaconsfield, in 1875, did something to 
retrieve the mistake by the famous purchase of the shares 
of the ruined Khedive, amounting in number to nearly half 
the 400,000 original shares in the canal. The purchase 
was enthusiastically praised and wildly condemned; it may 
now be admitted to have been a clever and successful stroke 
of policy. 

There were three courses open to M. de Lesseps and his 
energetic son, C-harles., in 1883, wlien the new canal schema 



EKCILAKD U.NDEK fILADSTOKE. 253 

was talked of. Either the existing canal might be "widened 
and enlarged generally, so as to allow of greater traffic be- 
tween its banks; oi' a new canal might be cut alongside 
through the land already belonging to the company at 
whose head M. de Lesseps was — a plan, however, which, 
owing to the limitations of the land actually at the dis- 
posal of the company, would entail many disadvantages, 
among others the necessary junction of the two canals at 
certain points. The third plan was, to obtain from the 
Egyptian Government concessions for an entirely new canal 
on entirely new ground in the isthmus. Such a new canal 
would undoubtedly be the best of all; and by using one 
canal for up and the- other for down ships, the traffic might 
be at once greatly increased and greatly accelerated. "Why 
then, it may be asked, should not England, with all her 
money and her engineering skill, build this second canal 
for herself? There were many complaints of the way in 
which the old canal was managed; of the heavy tolls ex- 
acted; of the absence of British influence in its manage- 
ment; of the completely French nature of its pilotage and 
officialdom generally. Why should not England, who had 
now learned the value of a canal, and regretted her old 
hostility to it, build this second canal, and pay no heed to 
the two Lessepses and their demands? M. de Lesseps^s an- 
swer was simple enough. The company, of which M. de 
Lesseps is the head, have a monopoly on the isthmus. 
The original grant, which allowed them to undertake the 
task of cutting a w^ater-way through the isthmus, and link- 
ing together the Mediterranean and Red seas, gives into 
their hands all rights of canal-cutting on the isthmus. 
Either the new canal must be cut by M. de Lesseps and his 
company, or it can not be cut at all. 

On the face of it, it must be admitted that there was a 
good deal in this way of stating the case. It was hardly 
conceivable that any man would go to work at such a busi- 
ness without some such monopoly to protect him. What 
would be the use of his expending his genius and his life, 
and all the funds he could raise to the cutting of a canal 
through the isthmus, if, the moment it was completed, and 
he had shown that the task could be done, any other nation 
could step in, and, profiting by his experience and his ex- 
ample, cut another canal by the side of his, and practically 
render his valueless? No railway company would mn. a 



254 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

line joining two towns unless they possessed some monopoly 
which insured them against any knot of adventurers who 
pleased, and who could collect money enough, starting a 
rival line between the same two towns within a week after 
the first line had been established. It seemed reasonable, 
therefore, to assume that M. de Lesseps had obtained such 
a monopoly. Facts, however, and not probabilities, were 
wanted. People in England wanted to know, not what 
M. de Lessej^s ought for his own security to have done, but 
what M. de Lesseps really had done. Had he secured from 
Egypt a monopoly of canal-cutting rights over the Isthmus 
of Suez to the exclusion of all other competitors? When 
the question of the second Suez Canal came up, and the 
English Government began to inquire into the matter, in 
the hope of obtaining some solid securities for British in- 
terest in the new venture, they answered in the affirmative. 
They at once conceded the claim of M. de Lesseps to an 
exclusive right to make a second canal through the Isthmus 
of Suez. They chose to regard themselves as coming to 
buy from a seller w^ho did not wish to sell, and to Avhose 
terms they had practically to agree. In their interpretation 
of the grant of Said Pasha they were suj^jported by the 
opinion of the law officers of the Crown, and of the Lord 
Chancellor himself. 

In this sjoirit the British Government went to M. de 
Lesseps and made certain provisional arrangements with 
him, subject, of course, to the approval of Parliament. 
By these arrangements the British Government were to ad- 
vance M. de Lesseps a sum of eight millions sterling, to 
assist him in cutting the new canal. In return for this 
loan M. de Lesseps was to make certain concessions and 
effect certain alterations in the dues and management of 
the two canals. On July 10 the heads of a provisional 
agreement were signed hi London by Sir C. Eivers Wilson 
and Mr. J. Stokes as representatives of the British Govern- 
ment, and by M. Charles Aime de Lesseps for the presi- 
dent of the Suez Canal Company. By this agreement 
England agreed to lend the company, by installments, a 
sum of eight millions at three per cent, interest, with a 
sinking fund, not to commence until after the completion 
of the works, calculated to repay the capital in fifty years. 
The Government also pledged themselves to use their good 
offices to obtain from the Egyptian Government conce?" 



ENGLAKT) rKDER aLAT)STON"'R. S55 

sions — ^firstj, for the land required for the new canal and its 
approaches; secondly^ for a sweet water canal between 
Ismailia and Port Said; thirdly, for an extension of the 
terms of the original concession for so many years as would 
make a new term of ninety-nine years from the date of 
completion of the second canal. In consideration of such 
an extension the company were to pay annually to the 
Egyptian Treasury from the commencement of this new 
term of ninety-nine years one per cent, of the total net 
profits, after the statutory reservation. 

The Canal company on its side agreed to construct the 
canal so that its width and depth should satisfy the En- 
glish directors. A reduction of the transit dues was agreed 
to on the basis that every increase of profits should be 
shared with the shipowners. In other words, an increase 
of profits would always mean a decrease of transit dues 
down to a minimum of five francs per ton; while, on the 
other hand, a decrease of profits would mean an increase of 
transit daes on the same scale. No second increase or de- 
crease of transit dues was to take place in the same year. 
From January 1, 1884, ships in ballast were to pay twenty- 
two francs per ton less than ships with cargo. It was 
hoped that pilotage dues would be got rid of altogether by 
January 1, 1887. An existing grievance in the use of ex- 
clusively foreign pilots was to be got rid of by the employ- 
ment of a fair proportion of English pilots. The agree- 
ment further included the appointment of an English 
officer, selected by Her Majesty^s Government, to be called 
Inspecteur de la Navigation, to whom the captains of En- 
glish vessels could address themselves in cases of complaint, 
or of desired communication with the company. Finally, 
it was agreed that one of the English directors was always 
to be a vice-president of the company. 

Such were the terms agreed to between the representa- 
tives of the British Government and the President of the 
Suez Canal Company. When they were made known in 
England they were greeted with almost unanimous disap- 
proval. From the Chambers of Commerce all over the 
country a chorus of angry discontent was raised. In Par- 
liament Sir Stafford Northcote immediately gave notice of 
the hostilities of the Opposition to the proposed agreement, 
and it soon became plain that in the Liberal ranks there 
was no slight dislike to the new plan. The Government sud- 



S56 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

denly found themselves involved in a serious and unexpected 
difficulty. They met it by quietly abandoning the whole 
affair. The arrangement was undertaken, Mr. Gladstone 
said in effect, for the benefit of the country; if the country 
did not approve of it — and the country had undoubtedly 
shown that it did not approve of it — there was nothing for 
it but to give the business up and leave M. de Lessej^s and 
his son to their own devices. Sir Stafford Northcote very 
successfully spoiled the really strong position Avhich the 
agitation had given him by bringing forward a motion 
which, while ostensibly directed against M. de Lesseps, was 
of a nature that M. de Lesseps himself would have cordial- 
ly agreed to. Sir Stafford Northcote^'s motion combated 
the assumption which nobody had raised, that M. de Les- 
seps had a monopoly in the making of canals to join the 
Mediterranean and the Red Sea. M. de Lesseps's most 
enthusiastic advocates never claimed such a monopoly for 
him; his most imj^assioned antagonists never alleged that 
he had claimed any such monopoly. All that M. de Les- 
sejjs did claim was the monopoly of piercing the Isthmus 
of Suez. This pomt the Government had conceded to him; 
this claim the Opposition objected to; but this claim was 
not combated or indeed alluded to in Sir Stafford Nortli- 
cote^s motion. At one time the Opposition seemed to have 
the game entirely in their own hands; but Sir Stafford 
Northcote^s motion gave it back at once into the hands of 
the Government. An amendment was brought forward 
from the Ministerial side of the House, setting forth the 
condition of things in a clearer fashion, and was of course 
carried. 

In Ireland things were unquiet. Early in January Mr. 
Davitt, Mr. Healy, and Mr. Quum were tried before the 
Queen^s Bench in Dublin, on account of speeches they had 
delivered, and were ordered to find securities for their good 
behavior or to go to prison for six months. They chose 
imprisonment, and were accordingly committed to Rich- 
mond Prison on the second week of February. In Janu- 
ary, also, the Irish executive began an action for libel 
against Mr. William O'Brien, editor of "United Ireland," 
for an article which he had written against Lord Spencer. 
At the time of the action Mr. William O'Brien was stand- 
ing as a candidate for the town of Mallow, which had 
become vacant through the acceptance by the Solicitor- 



EKGLAKD UKDER GLABSTOHE. '267 

General for Ireland of a place of profit under the Crown. 
Mallow was a constituency which seemed very unlikely to 
return a National candidate. Once before it had returned 
a very moderate Home Euler, Mr. John George MacOarthy, 
to the great surprise of everybody. But it was generally 
looked upon as a safe seat for an Irish Government official. 
This time, however, the condition of things was changed. 
Mr. William O^Brien, extreme among extreme Nationalists, 
was returned at the head of the poll by a majority of 72 
over the new Solicitor-General for Ireland, Mr. Naish. On 
February 9 the new member for Mallow was put upon his 
trial for the alleged libel, and the next day the trial came 
to an end, as the jury were unable to agree. 

All other causes of public interest in Ireland, however, 
were destined for some months to sink into comparative in- 
significance when compared with the excitement aroused by 
certain inquiries that were going on at Kilmainham Court- 
house. On January 13 the Dublin police made a sudden 
raid upon several houses in the town, and arrested seventeen 
men. Two days later three other arrests were made, and 
on the 20th the prisoners were brought into Dublin Court- 
house, and formally charged with being associated in a 
conspiracy to murder Government officials. Most of these 
men were of the artisan class — stone-cutters, compositors, 
van-men, and masons; one was of better position, James 
Carey, a well-to-do contractor and builder, who had been a 
suspect, and was recently elected to the Dublin Town 
Council. Of all the prisoners this man carried himself 
most coolly, protested the loudest against the injustice of 
his arrest and the inconvenience it caused him. On the 
20th he stepped out of the prison van, smoking a cigar, 
carefully dressed to represent a thriving tradesman who was 
proud of civic honors, ostentatiously, even aggressively, 
composed in bearing. Offers of bail for any of the prison- 
ers were rigorously refused. The doubts — and they were 
many — as to the value of the police raid were soon dispelled. 
One of the arrested men, Farrell, promptly turned in- 
former. He did not know much. Little that Farrell told 
about the Fenian organization itself , itsB^s and C's, its sub- 
scriptions and distributions of arms and secret drilling, 
was either new or important. It was when he came to 
describe the "inner circle," formed for the purpose of 
assassinating Government officials, that interest began to 



258 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

thicken. Farrell was not himself a member of this inner 
circle, and its existence has been frequently denied and fre- 
quently affirmed since. 

The '^ member of the Fenian brotherhood^' who, in the 
February and March of 1884, wrote letters on the subject 
of the I. R. B. to the '^Pall Mall Gazette/' admitted its 
existence, and described some of its acts. Its existence 
and its acts were immediately flatly denied by another cor- 
respondent of the same journal, who wrote under the sig- 
nature of '' One who Knows. " Farrell gave minute descrip- 
tions of a series of attempts to assassinate Mr. Forster, all 
of which failed almost in the very moment of execution 
through some chance which seemed little short of miracu- 
lous. He also offered hearsay evidence as to the attack on 
Mr. Field, in which five men — Brady, Kavanagh, Kelly, 
Dwyer, and Hanlon — were imjjlicated. Later in the month 
another of the prisoners, Michael Kavanagh, turned in- 
former, and on his evidence Brady, Kelly, James Carey, 
Michael Fitzharris, Hanlon, Jose23h Mullett, James Mull- 
ett, Delaney, Edward O'Brien, John Moroney, Peter Ca- 
rey, Daniel Delaney, Patrick Whelan, and Michael Fagan 
were formally accused of taking part in the murders in the 
Phoenix Park on May 6, in the preceding year. Kavanagh 
declared that he drove Joe Brady, Tim Kelly, Patrick 
Delaney, and one other who was not in the dock, to the 
Phoenix Park on the evening of May 6. There they foimd 
James Carey waiting. There he saw the victims apjjroach- 
ing, saw James Carey give a signal by waving a handker- 
chief, saw one of the victims fall, and drove off with the 
four men whom he had brought there. On February 27 
he drove Brady and Delaney to the spot where they at- 
tacked Mr. Field, and after the attempt drove off with 
Brady and Kelly. The excitement of such evidence as this 
was soon surpassed by the appearance on the table of 
another, a far more remarkable informer, James Carey 
himself. This man was, on his own showing, a bloody and 
remorseless villain. He was the guiding spirit of the mur- 
der organization which called itself the Irish Invincibles. 
He organized the plans of assassination against Mr. Forster; 
his influence led his fellow-prisoners into the schemes; he 
planned the murder in the Phoenix Park; he gave the sig- 
nal for the crime, and composedly witnessed its execution. 
He afterward had the almost unparalled heartlessness to 



EIsTGLAND UNDEE GLADSTOHE. 259 

propose a motion of condolence witli the widow of Lord 
Frederick Oavendish. 

History does not afford many examples of so complete a 
villain; fewer still of villains composedly giving testimony 
to their own infamy. Oarey^s evidence was the practical 
conclusion of the trials. Some effort was made to compro- 
mise the Land League as a body by his evidence^ but the 
attempt failed. Men who were also members of the Land 
League were criminated by his evidence, but no proof 
whatever was adduced that the Land League organization 
had any connection with the schemes of crime^, or that the 
mysterious E"umber One, who, according to Carey, was the 
prompter of the whole business and the finder of funds, was 
in any way associated with the Land League. Carey de- 
clared that the woman who brought over the knives, with 
which the Phoenix Park assassinations were committed, 
from London was Mrs. Prank Byrne, the wife of an official 
of the English branch of the Land League; but when she 
was arrested and confronted with him he failed to identify 
her. Another proof, if proof were really needed of the 
wide gulf between the leaders of the National party and 
the members of secret societies, was afforded by one of the 
prisoners. This man kept a diary, which formed part of 
the evidence which convicted him, and in this diary he put 
on record his unmitigated contempt for constitutional agi- 
tators like Mr. Parnell. Those who really knew Lish af- 
fairs were, of course, aware that the secret societies regard 
the Parliamentary agitation with unconcealed contempt 
and dislike. The diary of James MuUett was only one ad- 
ditional piece of evidence toward what might be considered 
an obvious fact. 

Brady, Curley, Michael Pagan, Oaffrey, and Timothy 
Kelly were convicted, sentenced to death, and hanged. 
Delaney, Pitzharris, and Mullett were sentenced to penal 
servitude for life; the others to various periods of penal 
servitude. True bills were found against Walsh and P. J. 
Sheridan, who had escaped to America, and against a man 
Tynan, said to be ^'Number One,^^ who had also got away 
to America. The fate of James Carey was dramatic. Por 
a time he was kept in Kilmainham, until the authorities 
should decide what to do with him. He blustered a good 
deal of his determination to remain in Dublin, and his in- 
tention to take his place as usual on the Dublin Town 



3f)0 ' ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

Council. Then he suddenly disappeared. It was assumed 
that the Government would insure his removal to some 
safe place, establish him in some Crown colony, or appoint 
him warder in some prison, where, under a changed name, 
he might defy detection, and never be heard of again. 
Suddenly, in July, came the startling news from the Oa2)e 
that James Carey had been shot dead on board shijD at sea 
by a man named O^Donnell. The story was disbelieved at 
first, but it was soon confirmed. O^Donnell was brought 
to London, tried, found guilty, and hanged. The evidence 
did not make it certain whether he killed Carey in a sud- 
den fit of indignation at finding himself with the detested 
informer, or was sent as the sj^ecial emissary of a secret 
society to make aAvay with him. 

Toward the end of the year the old Orange and Green 
feud was revived in Ireland with peculiar animosity. It 
had never, indeed, di^d out, but of late years its old 
ferocity seemed to have faded. Ever since 1795, Avhen the 
first Orange lodge was founded in Armagh, after the 
'^Battle of the Diamond, ^^ Orangeism had become an im- 
portant factor in the political situation of Ireland. The 
Orangelnen were the legitimate successors of the old 
English ^'^ garrison,^'' of the chivalry of the Pale, of the 
Cromwellians of the plantations, of the Scotch " settlers. ^^ 
The guiding principle of Orangeism was antagonism to 
Catholicism. It supjDorted the penal laws while they still 
existed; it struggled hard against their repeal; it repre- 
sents to-day the spirit which animated and insjDired the 
penal laws. The entertaining inspector of police who has 
introduced himself to contemporary literature as " Terence 
M^Grath,^^ gives, in his '^Pictures from Ireland," a sketch 
of a typical Orangeman, which, coming from such a source, 
can not be considered to be biased by any undue prejudice 
against the Orange institutions. ^^From the time when he 
was old enough to throw a stone at a Catholic procession 
on Patrick's Day, the most stirring incidents of McGetti- 
gan's life have been connected with the annual commem- 
oration of the two victorious engagements fought by the 
much lauded and sorely execrated monarch. . . . The 
village of Juliansborough is a well-known Protestant 
stronghold; and, though a Koman Catholic chapel stands 
about half a mile away, no one of that benighted faith 
would have the audacity to pass through the village to his 



ENGLAKD UKDER GLADSTONE. 261 

devotions during tlie month of July. . . . The prin- 
ciples of the Orange Society are ^ civil and religious liberty,^ 
and McGettigan flatters himself that he adopts them to the 
fullest extent. . . . But with ' Papishers ^ it is a differ- 
ent thing. 

^' That every one of these followers of the Scarlet Woman 
is destined to eternal perdition is as firm an article of be- 
lief with William McGettiga.n as that the evening and the 
morning were the first day; and he feels that, in doing all 
that in him lies to obstruct the religious practices of Popery, 
and otherwise make the lives of the Papishers a burden to 
them, he is simply doing his duty as a good citizen. 
Patrick^s Day passed, McGettigan bears no violent malice 
against his Catholic neighbors. He has even walked to 
market on more than one occasion with members of that 
faith. But with the heat of June his sentiments become 
less dormant, and with the first of July sets in a period of 
intolerance that, for thirty days at least, subverts his rea- 
son. During this time a Sister of Mercy with a cup of 
water in the desert would be an unwelcome sight; and a 
general inclination to wade knee-deep in Catholic blood is 
accompanied by a worship of the Orange lily as real as the 
' idolatry ' that he so bitterly condemns. The clergyman 
of his church has a certain influence with him, but it is in 
exact opposition to that jDastor^'s attitude toward the Orange 
Society. The basis of his faith is the warrant and rules of 
his lodge, and while cursing his Koman Catholic opponents 
he never imagines that his religion is as much a religion 
of hatred as the gloomy frenzy of the Puritans or the tribal 
ferocity of the ancient Jews. In his political principles he 
is torn by conflicting emotions. He approves of tena.nt 
right, fixity of tenure, freedom of sale, and vote by ballot. 
So far he is Liberal, but he votes with the Conservatives; 
for is not the extension of the franchise a Liberal proposal 
that would, in proportion to the lowness of level at which 
the line is drawn, increase the number of Catholic votes? 
And did not the Liberals disestablish the Church that 
seemed to McGettigan an evidence of Protestant ascendency 
that gratified his vanity, and assented to the principles of 
the Orange Society, in which all sections of Protestants 
could meet on common grounds? McGettigan calls him- 
self a thorough Loyalist, but his feelings toward England 
are exactly indentical with his feelings and attitude toward 



202 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

the Church. He is loyal to Protestant England because 
she represents to him Protestantism versus Popery. If she 
became Roman Catholic he would hate her with all his 
heart; and if she grants Home Rule he will vote for the re- 
moval of the Union Jack from Orange processions.-'^ Such 
is the picture^ drawn in no unfriendly spirit, by a writer as 
bitterly opj^osed to the National party as McGettigan him- 
self, of the Orange agitation of the north of Ireland, the 
member of a secret society as fatal in its way to the well- 
being of the country as the Ribbon Lodges themselves. 
How little the loyalty of the Orange Society could be de- 
pended upon was shown in 1835, when the Orange plot to 
place the Duke of Cumberland upon the throne instead of 
Queen Victoria was discovered and defeated. 

Toward the end of the year the old Orange and Green 
feud was revived with peculiar animosity. The direct 
cause of this revival was a crusade which Sir Stafford 
Northcote carried on in the north of Ireland against the 
Government. In one of his national ballads Thomas Davis 
expresses a belief that Orange and Green will join together. 
''^William and James are turned to clay,^^ he says, and it 
is time for faction and feud to pass away like them. ^' The 
Irish unite, and Orange and Green will carry the day.^' 
But there seemed less prospect than ever of Orange and 
Green uniting after Sir Stafford Northcote^'s Ulster cam- 
paign. Sir Stafford l^orthcote was never meant to be an 
agitator, nor were his crusade speeches in themselves of a 
very dangerous character. But they succeeded in arousing 
all the old j)arty passions. The Monaghan election had 
been a severe blow to the Orange garrison in Ulster, and 
they were eager to efface its recollection by any means in 
their power. Orange riots followed Sir Stafford North- 
cote's progress through the north of Ireland. In one of 
these a convent in Belfast was attacked, and the lady 
suj^erior, who was ill, died of the alarm and the excitement. 
Sir Stafford Northcote and the speakers who accompanied 
him inflamed the Orange mobs they addressed not merely 
against the Nationalist party, but against the Government 
\vhich supjDorted, abetted, and basely yielded to the de- 
mands of the National party. The Orange party were in- 
sj)ired by the double purpose of fighting the Nationalists 
and harassing the Government. Whenever a National 
meeting was announced to be held in Ulster the Orange 



DHGLAKD UNDEE GLADSTOKE. 263 

party immediately organized a counter-meeting to oppose 
what they chose to call the invasion of their county. 

To appreciate properly the situation, it must be remem- 
bered that even in Orange Ulster something like half of the 
population are Catholics, and that when the new franchise 
comes into effect the majority of the votes will no longer 
be the privileged possession of the supporters of the Orange 
lodges. The Nationalist leaders always found in Ulster 
large audiences of ^Nationalists; Mr. 'Healy^s election for 
Monaghan showed that Orangeism could not always turn 
the scale against the men who had made the land agitation. 
It was perfectly clear that if N"ational and Orange meet- 
ings were held on the same* day and in the same locality 
without precautions, it would be impossible to preserve 
peace. The Orange leaders wrote and spoke in a way 
which showed that they were determined to rival the wild- 
est utterances ever made on the ISTational side. A National 
meeting was announced to be held in Rosslea, in Ferman- 
agh, on October 16, 1883. Lord Eossmore, the Grand 
Master of the Orangemen of the County Monaghan, and a 
justice of the peace, signed a proclamation calling upon 
the Orangemen to oppose the meeting. It was evident that 
a crisis was at hand, and the Irish executive poured a large 
force of military and police into the district, who succeed- 
ed in keeping the two crowds apart in spite of the attempts 
of Lord Eossmore to bring about a collision. 

The account of the proceedings of the Orange meeting 
on that day is extraordinary. '^ Some pistol-shots were 
fired into the air in the outskirts of the crowd, and im- 
mediately the fire was taken up by several hundred persons 
throughout that vast assemblage. Pistols and revolvers 
were produced on all sides, and a continuous fusillade was 
maintained for nearly fifteen minutes. The leaders en- 
deavored to stay the deafening discharge, but for some 
time without effect." Lord Crichton and other Orange 
leaders on the platform were obliged to stoop down for fear 
of being shot by their own adherents. " When the excite- 
ment subsided several Protestant clergymen came to Lord 
Crichton, and asked him could he prevail on the Orange- 
men to stop firing. Lord Crichton, spreading out his hands, 
called out in as loud a voice as he was able to command, 
^ For God^s sake, men, will you listen to what I say, and 
stop the firing?' ^^ Lord Eossmore's speech, which was in- 



264: ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

terrupted at one point for some ten minutes by the firing of 
liundreds of revolvers, was especially violent. ' ' He thought 
that it was a great pity that the so-called Government of 
England stopped loyal men from assembling to uphold 
their institutions here, and had sent down a handful of 
soldiers, whom they could eat up in a second or two if they 
thought fit." For Lord Rossmore^s conduct he was re- 
moved from the commission of the peace by the Govern- 
ment, to the great indignation of the Orange lodges and 
their leaders. The tenor of Orange talk became more 
violent. A circular, signed by Captain Charles Alexander, 
advised the Orangemen in every district to enroll themselves 
into an armed volunteer force, to provide stores of arms, 
and to create, in fact, a complete military organization. 
Lord Enniskillen, the Orange Grand Master, repudiated the 
circular on the ground that it contained ^^projoosals of an 
illegal character ;^^ but the fact that such a circular coidd 
have been issued, and such proposals seriously entertained, 
is in itself sufficiently curious. 

Counter-meetings were held at Dromore, in Tyrone, on 
January 1, 1884. Police and military held the ground to 
23revent hostilities; but several attacks were made upon 
the IS'ationalists by the Orangemen, who had to be driven 
back by the bayonets of the police and the sabers of the 
cavalry. In one of these encounters a young Orangeman 
named Giffen, who had been brought in — like many others 
— from another district to swell the Orange levees for the 
occasion, was mortally wounded and died shortly after. 
The Government then adopted the plan, whenever Orange 
and Green counter-meetings were announced, of proclaim- 
ing both meetings; breaches of the peace were thus pre- 
vented, though the Nationalist party strongly protested 
against a policy which allowed the Orangemen to silence 
any National meeting by merely announcing opposition, 
and thus calling down a Government proclamation on both 
alike. 

In April, 1883, a measure was introduced and passed 
into law with almost unrivaled rapidity. This was the Bill 
for amending the law relating to explosives, which was in- 
troduced by Sir William Harcourt on Monday, April 9, 
passed through all its stages in the Commons in less than 
two hours, was sent to the Lords, and received the royal 
assent the next day. There was reason for this unusual 



EKGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 265 

haste. Much had been said and written for some time by 
a section of Irish-Americans in New York about the intro- 
duction of dynamite into the political difficulties between 
England and Ireland. Threats to blow up London build- 
ings were uttered at meetings of the advocates of dynamite, 
and printed m their journals, but at first little heed was j)aid 
to these utterances. On the night of Thursday, March 15, 
1883, however, an attempt was made to blow up the ofiices 
of the Local Government Board at the corner of Whitehall 
and Charles Street. No great damage was done, and no 
lives were lost, but a great many windows were broken. 
The wall and one room of the Local Government Offices 
were considerably shattered, and for a time considerable 
alarm was created. A simultaneous attemj^t to blow up 
the '^ Times " office failed through the fortunate accidental 
overturning of the infernal machine used, which prevented 
it from operating. The same attempted explosions by 
dynamite in Glasgow appeared to be in fulfillment of these 
threats, but they did not arouse much public excitement. 
The Government immediately offered the reward of a thou- 
sand pounds for the apprehension of the criminals, but no 
clew was obtained, and no information given. 

It was confidently expected that the attempts would be 
repeated, and every precaution was taken. At all the pub- 
lic offices, important public buildings, and the residences 
of statesmen, a military guard was placed, or, where it ex- 
isted before, was doubled. For some little time after the 
event London presented an unwontedly military air. The 
presence of so many soldiers in places where formerly no 
other guardianship than that of the policeman was re- 
quired lent London something of the appearance of a 
Continental city. These precautions, however, were not 
long maintained, and in a short while London resumed its 
wonted aspect. The dynamite difficulty was not at an 
end, unfortunately. In the first week in April, 1883, the 
police succeeded m discovering a conspiracy, in arresting 
eight men concerned, and in seizing a large quantity of 
nitro-glycerine, which was manufactured in Birmingham, 
and was being secretly conveyed to London. It was im- 
joossible to identify- the men arrested with the perpetrators 
of the attempt w^on the Local Government Board and the 
" Times " office. But their connection with the Irish- Ameri- 
can advocates of dynamite was clearly established. To meet 



266 ElfGLAKD UNDER GLADSTONE. 

what seemed like n widespread conspiracy tlie Explosives 
Bill was hurried through Parliament. Four of the prison- 
ers were sentenced to penal servitude for life; two were 
acquitted. These sentences and the comprehensive powers 
of the new measure did not, however^ prevent further dyna- 
mite crimes. The police made seizures of nitro-glycerine 
in Leicester, and in Cuj^ar, in Fife. Men were arrested in 
Glasgow on the charge of being concerned in the outrages 
of January. Four men were sentenced to penal servitude 
for life for introducing explosive substances into England 
at Liverpool. 

On October 30, 1883, two explosions took place on the 
MetrojDolitan Railway, one between Westminster and Char- 
ing Cross, the other between Praed Street and Edgeware- 
Road. Both occurred almost at the same time, about eight 
o^clock in the evening; both did considerable damage to 
property, and many human beings were injured, though no 
one fatally. No trace of the perpetrators of this outrage 
was discovered. Toward the end of February in 1884, a 
yet bolder outrage was attempted, which happily only par- 
tially succeeded. At a little after one on the morning of 
Tuesday, February 26, an explosion took place in the lug- 
gage-room of Victoria Station, which wrecked a large jDart 
of the station, and destroyed a considerable amount of 
property. Though it was at once assumed that this was part 
of a dynamite plot, the destruction of everything in the lug- 
gage-room was so great that absolute proof might have been 
difficult to obtain. The discovery of infernal machines at 
Charing Cross, Ludgate Hill, and Paddington stations sup- 
plied the necessary proofs. In the luggage-room of each 
of these stations a portmanteau was discovered, containing 
a large quantity of dynamite connected with a pistol, and a 
clock timed to go off at a certain hour. In each of these 
cases the defective nature of the machinery employed had 
happily prevented catastrophes which would in all proba- 
bility have been far more dangerous than that at Victoria 
Station. An attempt was made later on Blackf riars Bridge. 
Early in 1885 two explosions took place in Westminster, 
one in the great hall and one in the chamber of the House, 
which did great damage and seriously injured two police- 
men. 

No language can be too strong in condemnation of these- 
criminal attempts. The freedom and the future of Ireland. 



EKGLAKD UKBER GLADSTONE. 267 

are not to be worked out by means abhorrent to all Christian 
men. Eyery Nationalist^ every one who believes that the 
hour of Ireland^s regeneration is daily^ even hourly, draw- 
ing nearer, who believes that in the immediate future the 
Parliament of Ireland will be restored to her, can only feel 
horror at such deeds. The cause of Ireland is not to be 
served by the knife of the assassin and the infernal-machine 
of the dynamitard. 

In Ireland the Nationalist party had received some im- 
portant advantages. The Mallow election has already been 
mentioned. Mr. Harrington was elected for Westmeath in 
March, while undergoing unjust imprisonment under the 
Crimes Act. In the same month Mr. John Dillon resigned 
his seat on account of ill-health, and the vacancy was filled 
by another Nationalist, Mr. Mayne. A contest for Dublin 
County resulted in the return of the Conservative candi- 
date. Colonel King Harman, and the election for Port- 
arlington gave a victory to the Opposition. Later on, in 
June, Mr. Healy, who with Mr. Davitt and Mr. Quinn had 
Just been released from Richmond Prison, after the three 
had served the larger part of their term of imprisonment, 
resigned his seat for Wexford, and came forward as a can- 
didate for Monaghan in place of Mr. Given, who had re- 
ceived an appointment from the Government. Monaghan^s 
position as an important Ulster constituency gave a peculiar 
interest to the struggle which ended in the return of Mr. 
Healy. A week or two later, Wexford, the seat which Mr. 
Healy had vacated, was won by the National candidate, Mr. 
Redmond the younger, against Liberal and Tory oppo- 
nents. 

The new Chancellor of the Exchequer introduced his 
Budget on April 5, 1883. Mr. Childers began by ex- 
plaining that his recent assumption of office did not allow 
him to attempt any striking alteration of taxation. The 
revenue for 1882-83 was over £89,000,000, or rather more 
than £4,000,000, more than was originally estimated. The 
total expenditure, including the cost of the Egyptian war, 
was a little more than £88,000,000, so that there was a 
surplus of some £98,000. The surplus for the current 
year, £2,691,000, allowed Mr. Childers to propose the de- 
votion of £135,000 to the abolition of the passenger duty 
on all railway fares of a penny a mile and under; of £170,- 
000 to the establishment of the sixpenny telegrams; of 



268 EKGLAKD UKDER GLADSTONE. 

£2,135,000 toward removing from the income tax the 
Egyptian tliree-lialfpence. 

One of the latest financial efforts of the Ministry, in the 
fading session of 1883, was the introduction of the Nation- 
al Debt Bill. Mr. Childers moved the second reading, and 
explained the principles of the Bill, on Tuesday, August 
7th. The Bill proposed to reappropriate — with the ex- 
ception of some million pounds — all the amounts then de- 
voted to the reduction of debt, and to fix the bulk of it for 
that purpose until no debt should be left. The Bill pro- 
vided, first, to convert £40,000,000 of Chancery Stock into 
twenty-year annuities; secondly, to cancel about £30,000,- 
000 of Savings-Bank Stock by the creation of three annui- 
ties of five, ten, and fifteen years; and, thirdly, to cancel 
the unpaid balance of most of the existing annuities by the 
issue of a fresh twenty years' annuity. By these means the 
Chancellor of the Exchequer hoped to cancel £133,000,000 
of stock within the twenty years. As the Bill jDrovided for 
the creation of fresh annuities as the shorter ones fell in, 
so as to keep the permanent charge of the debt at about 
£28,000,000, as well as maintaining the Sinking Fund es- 
tablished by Sir Stafford Northcote in 1875, Mr. Childers 
expected that in the same period of twenty years the total 
cancelment of permanent annuities would exceed £177,- 
000,000. 

The new Bill was practically based upon the Act of 1875 
introduced by Sir Stafford Northcote. Th^t Bill settled the 
amount of principal and interest of the National Debt to 
be paid off annually at £28,000,000, that figure being se- 
lected on the average observed from 1815 to 1860. The 
Sinking Fund system which Sir Stafford Northcote then 
devised, and into which he broke under pressure of finan- 
cial difficulties in 1880, was expanded and strengthened by 
Mr. Childer's proposals. For the series of terminable an- 
nuities, exceeding £6,000,000, which were to fall in in 
1885, a system of terminable annuities was to be substitut- 
ed, in which each new annuity would be larger than the 
old by the amount of the interest on the extinguished an- 
nuity; so that the amount of debt paid off would increase 
year by year. The new system did not offer the same 
temptations that the Sinking Fund which they super- 
seded offered. Though annuities — that is, fixed annual 
payments for a limited time, made up of interest and instal- 



ENGLAKD UKDER GLAD'feTONE. 269 

ment of principal upon tlie debt wMch the annuity repre- 
sents — are^ indeed, in themselves a Sinking Fund, succes- 
sive Governments and Parliaments have abstained from 
making the depredations on them to which Sir Stafford 
JSTorthcote^s Sinking Fund was exposed, and from which it 
suffered. The Bill met with some opposition, chiefly, 
curiously enough, from Sir Stafford Northcote himself. 
The arguments which he must have thought excellent in 
1875 seemed suddenly to have grown unpalatable in 1883. 
He even urged that the new Government was trying to pay 
off the National Debt -^oo rapidly. But in spite of the an- 
tagonism of a former Chancellor of the Exchequer to a 
Bill brought in by his successor on the lines of a measure 
of his own, the second reading of the E"ational Debt Bill 
was carried by 149 to 95. 

The chief measure of the session was Mr. Ohamberlain^'s 
Bankruptcy Bill, which became law toward the end of 
August. By this Bill official receivers of the Board of 
Trade were employed to make inquiries into the circum- 
stances of each bankruptcy, and to make reports thereon. 
Over the Agricultural Holdings Bills for England and 
Scotland, strife like that over the Land Act of 1881 was 
revived between the Lords and Commons. The object of 
the measure was to compel landlords to compensate out- 
going tenants for improvements effected by the tenants. 
After much wrangling the measures passed the Commons, 
only to meet with the fiercest opposition in the Lords from 
Lord Salisbury and his party. Had the Bills embodied 
every principle of that '^ revolution " which is Lord Salis- 
bury's political bugbear, he could not have opposed them 
with more. fervor — a fervor, which, in the end, many of his 
adherents declined to emulate. Twice was the Bill, man- 
gled out of all meaning, sent back to the Commons, and 
twice the Commons returned it restored to its original form. 
Then Lord Salisbury gave way. His colleagues would not 
support him in further defiance of the Lower House. He 
held his hand, but not his peace, and with Lord Salisbury's 
ban upon it the Agricultural Holdings Bill, with its fellow 
Scottish measure, became law on the last day but one of 
the session, August 24. 

. Another im23ortant measure, the Corrupt and Illegal 
Practices Prevention Bill, was' passed in this session, to 
become law on the 15th of the October following. The 



270 ENGLAND UNDEH GLADSTONE. 

measure represented a determined effort on the j^art of the 
Government to enforce purity of election. By this Bill 
any candidate found guilty of corrupt practices was dis- 
abled from ever rej)resenting the constituency in which the 
offenses were committed, and from becoming a member 
of the House of Commons, holding any public office, or 
voting at an election, for a term of seven years. If, how- 
ever, the offenses are committed through his agents, the 
candidate will only be disabled fi-om representing that 
particular constituency for the term of seven years. A 
maximum exjaenditure for legitimate expenses was allowed 
by the Act, beyond which neither the candidate nor his 
agent would be allowed to go. The old custom of carrjdng 
voters to the poll in conveyances was made illegal. Undue 
influence, the use of bribery, and treating were made mis- 
demeanors, punishable by fine and imprisonment. Per- 
sonation was declared to be felony, and punishable by 
imprisonment with hard labor. Mr. Chamberlain's Patents 
for Inventions Bill did something toward remedying the 
unfairness of the existing laws toward patentees. Some 
measures of what is generally called paternal legislation 
had their origin in the House of Lords, and became law. 
One of these measures prohibited the payment of wages in 
2)ublic-houses; another looked after the sanitary condition 
of worshops and factories. From the Lords, too, came a 
measure dealing with the grievances of trawlers in the 
North Sea. The Government were obliged to abandon 
their Criminal AjDpeal Bill and the Criminal Code Bill, 
the former j^rojDOsing to establish a Court of Appeal in 
capital cases, the latter introducing many striking changes 
into the legal system. 

The Tramway and Public Compliance bill was a meas- 
ure of considerable importance to Ireland, only second in 
value, according to Mr. Parnell, to the Land Act and the 
Arrears Act. Its main object was the promotion of tram- 
ways in Ireland, but it also aimed at assisting emigration, 
and at extending some of the provisions of the Land Act 
to public comjjanies. Emigration was exceedingly unpop- 
ular with the Irish party and with the Irish people, and a 
system of migration from an overcrowded part of Ireland 
into thinly populated districts was advocated by Mr. Par-, 
nell and his followers. Unexpected difiiculties, indeed, 
had arisen against the emigration schemes of the Govern- 



ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 271 

ment. The United States proved to be as unwilling to re- 
ceive pauper emigrants as the Australian colonies had once 
been to receive convicts. America simply refused to re- 
ceive emigrants whose presence would prove a burden on 
the country; some emigrants were actually sent back;, and 
notifications were addressed to all the steam companies 
warning, them that the landing of paupers was j^i'ohibited. 
In Ireland, too, public opinion was strongly against emi- 
gration. The Roman Catholic bishops Jomed in a resolu- 
tion protesting against it and warmly advocating migration. 
In the end the Government agreed to use some portion of 
the sum set apart for emigration for the furtherance of 
migration. 

The Irish Laborers^ Bill, introduced by Mr. T. P. O^Oon- 
nor, empowered the sanitary authorities in rural districts to 
provide dwellings for laborers by means of Treasury loans, 
and with' the assistance of the Board of Works. Another 
measure affecting Ireland, the Sea Fisheries Bill, which 
proposed to encourage Irish fisheries by building piers and 
harbors by means of money advanced from the Irish Church 
Surplus Fund, was passed early in August. 

The Indian Criminal Procedure Amendment Bill, better 
known as the Ilbert Bill, was wildly agitating Indian and 
Anglo-Indian society, and the agitation was soon as keen 
in London as in Calcutta. In the January of 1882, Mr. 
B. L. Gupta, a distinguished native official of the Bengal 
Civil Service, pointed out the injustice of the existing law, 
by which native magistrates and sessions judges were for- 
bidden to try Europeans excej)t in the Presidency towns. 
The Indian Government, after inquiring into the matter, 
decided that the law called for alteration, and the result 
was Mr. Ilbert^s Bill. Mr. Ilberfs Bill proposed to extend 
the power of trying Europeans to all justices of the peace, 
whether European or native. The Bill aroused the wildest 
indignation in the Anglo-Indian community. Had Mr. II- 
bert^s proposal been to revive the East India Company, or 
to restore the kingdom of Delhi to the last descendant of 
the Grand Mogul, it could not have a roused- a fiercer or 
more angry opposition. Its supporters came to the rescue 
of the imperiled measure with equal vehemence; and In- 
dia and England were alike agitated on public platforms 
and in the press by the fiercest controversy that had stirred 
India since the days of the Mutiny. 



27^ ENGLAND UNDEli GLADSTONE. 

What the Bill proposed to do was not very daring. Its 
opi^onents habitually sjwke of it as if it were about to con- 
cede, for the first time, to Indian natives the right to try 
European settlers, and as if the concession involved with it 
the ruin of the Indian Emjnre. As a matter of fact, na- 
tive judges alreacly possessed, in the Presidency towns, the 
right of trying European offenders, and the llbert Bill only 
projiosed to extend this existhig privilege into other jior- 
tions of the Indian Empire. It is clear that existing civil- 
ization will no longer tolerate the government of an enquire 
like India on the good old-fashioned princijile which gave 
everything into the hands of the white adventurer, and re- 
duced the peoj^le of the country to a condition of practical 
servitude. The opponents of the Bill, however, even when 
they were willing to concede theoretically the right of the 
Hindoo to equality with the European, contested that prac- 
tically the a2)plicalion of the theory would not work at pres- 
ent. In the Presidency towns, perhaps, where all legal 
proceedings were carried on in full jDublicity, and where in- 
justice of any kind could be easily detected, it was allow- 
able to have Europeans tried by native judges. But in 
distant country districts there could be no such surety 
against injustice. The Indian mind was not yet, the oppo- 
nents of the Bill gravely urged, awakened to that fine spirit 
of equity which is so characteristic of English rule in India, 
and all sorts of injustice to Europeans might confidently 
be expected if British subjects in Hindostan were deprived 
of their time-honored privilege of trial by British subjects, 
and handed over to the corru2:)t mercies of a Hindoo tri- 
bunal. 

For months the agitation went on, and the clamor against 
the Bill increased. The Indian Government made a fresh 
effort to complete the expression of opinion from all the 
various local authorities. Roughly speaking, all native 
Indian officials were in favor of the measure; the majority 
of European officials wei'C opposed to it; a very large pro- 
portion Avere in favor of some modification of its principles. 
The Bill was then referred to a select committee, which in- 
troduced several imjiortant amendments as the means of 
effecting a compromise between the out-and-out sujDporters 
of the Bill and the Anglo-Indian Defense Association. 
The new amendments, while recognizing the general prin- 
ciple of the measure, introduced one or two alterations in- 



ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 273 

tended as safeguards for European interests. The old 
European privilege of being judged by Eurojieans alone was 
removed^ but in its place a new privilege was created^ by 
wliich a European charged before a district magistrate or 
before a sessions court would have the right to require a 
jury, of which not less than one half should consist of 
Europeans, or Americans, or both. Although this com- 
promise brought the question of race distinction more 
prominently forward than ever, and though it invested 
Europeans with an imjoortant privilege not allowed to 
natives, it w^as accepted by the Legislative Council, and the 
measure became law in January, 1884. The Maharajah of 
Durbungah expressed his regret that the new privilege had 
not been extended to natives; Mr. Evans, on behalf of the 
tjpponents of the Bill, declared that they still refused to 
recognize its so-called " principie,"^ and had only accepted 
a settlement for the sake of peace; Lord Ripon closed the 
debate, declaring that the natives had lost nothing, and 
had gained the vindication of a great principle. 

Another important Indian measure was the Bengal Ten- 
ancy, based on the recommendations of the Bengal Rent 
Commission appointed in 1879. This Bill was practically 
the first important attempt to define the relative rights of 
zemindars and cultivators in the most populous Indian 
provinces. The struggles between the ryots or laborers 
and the zemindars or landlords, which occupy so large a 
space in the history of British India, are practically a repe- 
tition on Indian soil of the landlord-and-tenant difficulty of 
Ireland; and the Bengal Tenancy Bill is in some measure 
the fellow of the Irish Land Act of 1880. It projooses, on 
the one hand,, to give reasonable security to the tenant in 
the enjoyment and occupation of his land, and, on the 
other hand, to afford the landlord reasonable facilities for 
the settlement and recovery of his rent. 

A difficult question in connection with the Australian 
colonies arose in 1883. This was the formal annexation, 
on the part of the Government of Queensland, of the island 
of New Guinea. For years the Australian colonies had 
been anxious to secure the authority of England in New 
Guinea, and in the islands of New Britain, New Ireland, 
and the Solomon and Santa Cruz Islands, which lie east- 
ward of New Guinea, as they urged that the occupation of 
these islands by any foreign Power would be injurious to 



274 EJ^GLAi^D UNDER GLADSTOJS^E. 

themselves and to the trade of Great Britain. The English 
Government were quite willing to see these annexations 
carried out in 1875^ if the Australian colonies could agree 
to act together; but this common agreement was wanting, 
and the scheme, for the time, fell through. In the March 
of 1883, however, the Government of Queensland decided 
to act on its o^\ii res23onsibility, without the assistance of 
the other Australasian Legislatures. 

Alarmed by rumors of possible annexation by France or 
Germany, Queensland took the bold step of sending an 
agent to New Guinea to hoist the British flag at Fort 
Moresby. This act was declared null and void by the Home 
Government, as one out of the powers of a colonial Gov- 
ernment. The disallowment roused a strong display of 
i)ublic feeling in all the Australian colonies. In the words 
of x\dministrator Sir A. H. Palmer, Queensland, it was 
^' undoubtedly the ojoinion throughout the whole of the 
Australian colonies that Great Britain should be supreme, 
and have no rival in the Southern Pacific. ^^ Mr, Service, 
the Premier of Victoria, wrote to express the profound re- 
gret of liis Government at the decision of the Home au- 
thorities; ^' a regret which I do not hesitate to say is echoed 
by the Governments and j^eople of Australia. It has been 
a serious and irreparable error to allow of French intru- 
sion among us in New Caledonia. " Mr. Service went on to 
say: ^^For New Caledonia has been constituted a i:)enal 
settlement, and the ex^^ense of our penal establishments is 
already appreciably swelled by the reconvictions here of 
escajDces and expirees from that colony. ... It has been as- 
sumed that Great Britain avoided responsibility by declin- 
ing possession of these islands. It seems to me that the 
res23onsibility lies wholly in the other direction, and that if 
the united voice of Australia declares that the annexation 
is a measure essential to our welfare and safety, there is a 
great responsibility in disregarding that voice. " The South 
Australian ministers were no less eager in their support of 
the annexation of New Guinea, of the New Hebrides, and 
the adjoining islands. The Premier of Queensland, Mr. T. 
Mcllwraith, in a memorandum laid before the. Executive 
Council of ,Queensland, declared that the action of Her 
Majest^s Government justified ^^some decided and con- 
certed action on the part of the Australian colonies. ... In 
1875 Lord Carnarvon, while not discouraging the idea of 



ENGLAND UNDEE GLADSTONE. 275 

extensive annexation, assigned as one reason why he could 
not act on the representations of the Australian colonies^ 
that the British taxpayer could not, and would not, bear 
the expenditure. Lord Derby advances the same reason 
now. The expense need not be great, and we now know 
that the Australian colonies will undertake this expense, 
or share it with Her Majesty^s Government if required to do 
so. If Her Majesty^s Government does not feel that the 
annexation of New Guinea or of the islands adjacent to 
Australia is of so much importance to the empire at large 
as it is to the Australian colonies, let some means be devised 
by which those islands may be held and governed for the 
benefit of the Australian people. ... The circumstances of 
the present case seem to point to a necessity for combination 
among the Australian colonies — a combination for both 
legislative and executive purposes.''^ 

While the Australian Premiers and people were agitating 
on the subject of annexation, an association was being got 
up in London under the title of '' The New Guinea Explo- 
ration and Colonization Company, ^^ the purpose of which 
was to organize a company of "^ adventurers '' — we use the 
word in its old Elizabethan sense — who would make a de- 
scent upon New Guinea and found a colony after the good 
old fashion of sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth cen- 
tury colonizers. The head and front, the promoter and 
inspirer of this ingenious scheme, was a remarkable man. 
Brigadier-General H. JR. Maclver was an excellent type of 
the soldier of fortune. He had served in his time — he was 
now still a comparatively young man — under no less than 
fourteen flags. He had fought whenever and wherever 
there was an opportunity for him to lend his sword to any 
cause that pleased him. He had fought for the Confeder- 
ates in the American civil war; he had fought for the 
Greeks against the Turks; he had fought for Don Carlos 
in Spain. General Maclver was not a revolutionary war- 
rior of the type of General Cluseret. Sprung from an old 
Scottish family, he inherited all the Highland traditions, 
and was a firm believer in Divine right. The " revolution^^ 
only inspired him with horror; but the magic words ^^the 
king " could always conjure up m him the spirit of loyalty 
which gave so many gallant hearts to the cause of the Old 
and the Young Pretender. But though Captain Mayne Eeid 
or M. Fortune du Boisgobey might have found an excellent 



276 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

subject for romance in the career of Brigadier-General 
Maclver, he did not quite commend himself to the 
Colonial Office as the very man to whom the colonization of 
New Guinea might best be intrusted. Lord Derby was per- 
emptory in his refusal to allow General Maclver to carry 
out his scheme. " If an attempt should be made to carry 
out the 2)roject described in your prospectus. Her Majesty^s 
Government will be under the necessity of instructing the 
High Commissioner for the Western Pacific, and the officer 
commanding Her Majesty^s naval forces on the station, 
to interfere for the protection of the native inhabitants of 
the islands.^' 

"With all his military experience and love for adventure. 
General Maclver was not prepared to wage war against the 
British Government. He promptly informed the Colonial 
Office that he had converted his organization into a peace- 
ful trading company. Lord Derby would have none of 
the trading company, however; and when the general 
went so far as to hint at floating the company under a 
foreign flag, he was significantly warned that '^'^the use of 
a foreign flag would not exempt the proceedings of the 
company^s managers and promoters from control. " This 
settled the matter. Nothing more was heard of the organ- 
ization, and General Maclver sought occupation for his rest- 
less sj^irit in other pursuits. But the incident was in itself 
remarkable, and gave a further stimulus to the Austi^a- 
lasian desire to obtain the government of New Guinea and 
the other islands themselves, and no longer leave them 
open to domestic or foreign enterjorise. 

In July, 1883, it became definitely known that the Gov- 
ernment of India had undertaken to pay Abdurrahman, 
the Ameer of Cabul, a yearly subsidy of £120,000, Tlie 
subsidy was to be raised by a tax on the j^eople of India; 
and", for the first time in the history of our connection with 
Central Asia, a subsidy to a Central Asian chief became a 
regular item of Budget exiDcnditure. This was not absolute- 
ly a new de23arture, indeed; only the permanent nature of 
the proposed subsidy was novel. Ever since England be- 
came mixed up with the afl'airs of Afghanistan, she has 
found it necessary to make over large sums to the various 
rulers of the country. All our relations with Afghanistan 
have been based on the assumption that some sort of al- 
liance with that counti-y is necessary in order to preserve 



"EKGLAND UKBER GLABSTOKE. ^77 

ourselves from the macMnations of a foreign foe. Of late 
years, and for long enough back,, the assumption has, of 
course, been that that foreign foe was Eussia. But such 
was not the assumption in 1809, when Elphinstone con- 
ducted the first English mission to Cabul. The foreign 
foe against whose machinations we had to guard ourselves 
then was France. Elphmstone's treaty with the then 
Ameer of Cabul was framed to resist a j)ossible invasion of 
France in co-ojoeration with Persia. But the dread of 
French arms in Afghanistan soon passed away and was for- 
gotten. Russia, in 1828, by the Treaty of Turcomanchai, 
obtained great influence at Teheran; and from that time 
forward her influence in Central Asia became the night- 
mare of English statesmen. 

By the death of John Eichard Green, in March, 1883, 
England lost one of her foremost historians. He first be- 
came famous by his ^'^ Short History of the English Peo- 
ple,^' ^^ Si history, ^^ in the words of its author, ^'^not of 
English kings or English conquests. '' The book at once 
passed into a great number of editions; it was read by 
everybody; it became adopted as a text-book in schools; it 
gave new life to the popular aj)preciation of English his- 
tory. The fame of its author was established, and for 
eight years he enjoyed his fame, writing, studying, devoted 
to his work. Then, on the threshold of a great career, he 
suddenly died at the age of forty-five, leaving behind him 
an enduring name and an enduring regret. A few days 
later, in the same month, another remarkable man died a 
too early death. Mr. Ashton Wentworth Dilke was only 
thirty-three years old, but he had already won himself a 
prominent place among the most advanced Eadicals, and a 
distinguished political career seemed insured to him. He 
had traveled widely, he knew Central Asia well, he was a 
varied and accomplished linguist, he knew Eussian as few 
Englishmen know it, and had translated Tourgueniefi^s 
latest novel into English. He entered Parliament under 
the new Gladstone Ministry as member for Newcastle, but 
the pressure of Parliamentary life proved too much for his 
health, which was never strong. He went to Algiers in 
the hope of recovery, but the hope was not fulfilled. He 
was sincerely regretted, in the truest sense of those familiar 
words, by all who knew him. Shortly before his death he 
had resigned his seat in Parliament, and his place was 



278 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

taken by Mr. John Morley, for whose success Mr. Ashton 
Dilke' sent his cordial wishes with what was almost his 
dying breath, from the pleasant African shore whither he 
had gone to die. 

In June died Henry S. Leigh. His life, also, too early 
shortened, for he was only forty-six years old, must be 
called, in some measure, a wasted life. He was a true poet; 
he had rare ability, but his talents were squandered on work 
unworthy of his hand, on the librettos of comic operas and 
the like, and his memory as a poet dejDcnds upon a few out 
of his too few verses. His poetry belonged to that order 
which has been given the absurd title of Vers de Societe, 
a title which is supposed, for want of a better, to include 
such widely different writings as those of Mr. Frederick 
Locker and Mr. Austin Dobson. Mr. Leigh^s verse was 
not the refined, urbane, polished society verse of Mr. Locker; 
it had not the exquisite grace and dainty scholarshijD of Mr. 
Dobson^s Dresden muse. It Avas the verse of a Londoner 
who loved London, and its theaters and its pleasant Bo- 
hemian clubs, and many of its men and some of its women. 
One can hardly help thinking that if Mr. Leigh had chosen, 
he might have been such a j^oet of London itself as London 
has never yet had. It was said that an early disappoint- 
ment had made him indifferent of success, and it may be 
so; certainly there were few men who, with such aj^parent 
certainty of success, took so little pains to win it. There is 
one of his poems, written years and years ago, when he was 
a very yoimg man, called, ^^ Little What^'s-her-name,''^ ad- 
dressed to some fair priestess of the temple of burlesque. 
It seems exceedingly light-hearted, and is intensely pathetic. 
If it had been written in Augustan Latin by a singer of the 
Sacred Way, or in Parisian argot by some haunter of the 
Pomme de Pin, it would have delighted scholars and book- 
worms who now, perhaps, have never heard of it. ^^ I 
would ask no higher honor, ^^ he saj^s, at the end; " I would 
seek no higher fame, than a corner in the memory of 
■' Little What^s-her-name. ' " It is no concern of ours or of 
any one^s to inquire who '^ Little What^s-her-name '^ was or 
is; but it is to be hoped, for the sake of her singer^s re- 
quest, that she did keep a corner of her memory for Heniy 
Leigh. 

Father Thomas Burke, the great Dominican preacher, 
the eloquent adversary of Mr. Froude^s histories, the man 



ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 279 

who most of all his time deserved the title of Ohrysostom 
— the new ^^ golden-mouth"^ — died in this year; so did 
E. B. Eastwick;, the Orientalist^ dear to so many who have 
first directed their uncertain steps through the perfumed 
paths of the rose-garden of Saadi of 8hiraz; so didRawdo]i 
Brown, the editor of the ^'^ Calendar of Venetian State 
Papers/" who went to Venice once for a visit, and loved it 
so well that he never left it; so did Payne Collier, the 
Shakespearean critic — not prematurely — ninety-four years 
old, likely to be remembered es|3ecially for his notorious 
" Perkin"s Folio "" and for his spiteful diaries; so did Cap- 
tain Mayne Reid, beloved by boys. John Brown, the 
Queen"s servant, died in March. The Duke of Marl- 
borough died in July, and was succeeded by his eldest son, 
Lord Blandford, who occupied in the Upper House the 
unique position of being the only peer who was an avowed 
advocate of home rule for Ireland. Sir George Jessel, the 
Master of the Rolls, who died in March, was the first Jew 
made a judge in England. A promising career was brought 
to an untimely end by the death of young Mr. Frank Hat- 
ton, who was killed out in Borneo by the accidental dis- 
charge of his own gun. Though he had not left his ma- 
jority ' long behind him, he had already made himself a 
name, and was like to have gone very far indeed had he 
lived. Some deaths that were not directly connected with 
England must not be suffered to pass unchronieled. In 
Germany died the last of the Goethes, Wolfgang von 
Goethe, a grandson of the poet. A little later the great 
musician, Richard Wagner, died. With Karl Marx died 
the head and front of Socialism, the greatest name in Ger- 
man revolution since Lassalle. France lost Gustave Dore, 
who was as popular, personally and pictorially, in London 
as in Paris. The death of the Count de Chambord, the 
devotee of the White Flag, shattered the hopes of the 
French Legitimists, and gave new hope to the Orleans 
party. In his self-chosen exile in France died Tourguenieff, 
the greatest of Continental novelists since Balzac. Over in 
Damascus died Abd-el-Kader, the gallant Emir, whose 
bright sword had so often held its own against the arms of 
France, and whose courage and chivalry did so much to 
save Christian lives during tlie Lebanon massacres of 1860. 
In Sir Salar Jung India lost a great statesman, and Eng- 
land one of the most valued of her counselors in the gov- 



280 ENGLAl^D UNDEE GLADSTOIifE. 

ernment of the country. The death of Prince Gortschakoff 
removed one of the most interesting figures of Continental 
diplomacy, but England can scarcely be said to have lost a 
friend. 



CHAPTER XV. 

THE SOUDAN. 

f'oR the hour we were fixed in Egypt. Nominally we 
were remaining merely to support the Khedive's authority; 
actually we were temporarily the masters of the country. 
The Khedivial Government could not have held together 
without us. The life of the Khedive would not have been 
worth a handful of paras half an hour after the last British 
soldier had embarked at Alexandria. We had had our own 
way in Egypt. After a j)eriod of inaction, even of inani- 
tion, we had. bestirred ourselves, and at the cost of bom- 
bardment and a bloodless camj)aign we had overthrown the 
ingenious system of the dual control which we had been at 
such pains to' set up some few years earlier. The dual 
control was an absurdity which it was undoubtedly for the 
welfare of England to abolish. But in abolishing it we had 
taken the responsibility of setting Egypt straight, and the 
responsibility was sufficiently severe. The country was 
hopelessly disorganized, hopelessly in debt, hopelessly de- 
moralized. It was like some child's puzzle, all the differ- 
ent portions of which were tumbled into bewildering med- 
ley, from which it was our task to sort the chaos and to 
piece together a com23lete and presentable scheme of gov- 
ernment. The task was not impossible, nor even ajopalling. 
It required time, temper, and trouble; but the desired end 
did not appear to be distant, and ministers were confidently 
predicting the hour when the last of the British bayonets 
should shine in the Egyptian sun, when the machinatiojis 
of an obscure fanatic in a distant desert disturbed all plans, 
and succeeded for a time in delaying the long-talked-of 
regeneration of 'Egypt. 

The region of the new trouble was the Soudan. Out in 
the. Soudan a religious rebellicai was simmering. On the 
maps of Africa the name Soudan is given to a vast tract of 
undefined desert, stretching across the center of the upper 
portion of the continent. It was formerly called Nigritia, 



EKGLAKD UNDER GLADSTOI^E, 281 

the country of the blacks^ and included, roughly speaking, 
all the region from Sahara on the north to the Nyanza 
Lakes on the south, from the Eed Sea on the east to the 
Atlantic on the west. But the Egyptian Soudan is confined 
in more narrow limits; it stretches from Egypt on the 
north to the Nyanza LaKCS on the south, from the Red Sea 
on the east to the western boundary of Darfour on the 
west. The casual traveler in Egypt who has drifted up 
the Nile in his dahabieh, or steamed up it in Mr. Oook^s 
steamers, as far only as Assouan, has just touched upon 
the fringe of the Soudan region. He has approached what 
was once, and what apparently will be again, one of the 
greatest slave marts in the world; he has looked with un- 
concerned eyes over the desert stretches which have lately 
occupied the attention of all the civilized world. Ujd to a 
year ago the Soudan was a vague, unmeaning term in the 
ears of most men; it has now assumed a very terrible iden- 
tity. In 1819 the conquering spirit of Mehemet Ali turned 
itself upon the Soudan, then in a chaotic condition of an- 
archy and tribal warfare. He sent his son Ismail Pasha 
with a large army to seize the country. Ismail got to 
Khartoum, and became for a season lord of the Soudan. 
We have spoken already of his tragic end. He offended 
Nemmir, the " Tiger '' King of Shendy, by too imperious- 
ly demanding tribute. The story is powerfully told in that 
book which would stand first on Eastern travel, if 
*^ Eothen " had never been written, " The Crescent and 
the Cross " of Warburton. Nemmir invited Ismail Pasha, 
his officers and friends, to a feast, surrounded the tent in 
which his guests were reveling with wood and straw, set 
fire to it, and burned them all to death. Ismail was 
avenged, and the rule of Egypt was set up over Kordofan. 
A generation came and went, during which such civiliza- 
tion as Egypt represented made slow progress in its new 
territory. Then Said Pasha thought of abandoning the 
country in despair, but was dissuaded by the tribal sheiks. 
The history of the Soudan for the next ten years is a monot- 
onous record of unsuccessful attempts at reform, of succes- 
sive governors-general, of wars with Abyssinia, and inter- 
nal insurrections. In 1865 a serious mutiny of negro 
troops at Tokha called forth all the energies of the Egyp- 
tian Government to suppress ib. It was suppressed, and 
the Soudan was garrisoned with Egyptian troops. In 1870 



282 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

Sir Samuel Baker conquered for Egypt the- equatorial pro- 
vinjces, and rul6d as governor of the tribes in Upper Egypt. 
In 1874 Sir Samuel Baker was succeeded by Colonel Gordon 
— ** Chmese " Gordon — and a new departure in the history 
of the Soudan began. 

Chmese Gordon is one of the most remarkable men of 
our age. If one imagines a combination of a fifteenth- 
century condottiere with a fourth-century Father of the 
Church, one gets perhaps the nearest approach to a de- 
scription of Chinese Gordon. He is Sir John Hawkwood, 
but he is also Jerome; he is in the noblest sense of the 
word an adventurer^, but his ''pure soul^^ has always 
served "beneath the colors ^^ of "his captain, Christ/' 
like Shakespeare'' s Norfolk. Charles Gordon was born on 
January 28, 1833, of a good old Scottish family. The 
Gordons were a race of soldiers; two of the same kin 
fought on opposite sides at Preston Pans. Charles Gor- 
don's grandfather fought in the North American war, and 
served imder Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham. " For a 
century and a half,"' says Mr. Hake, in his " Story of the 
Life of Chinese Gordon,'' " the family had been a family 
of soldiers, and that without threatening extinction, for 
there is a new generation in the service." Charles Gordon 
fought in the Crimean War. In 1860 he was ordered to 
China, and was present during the assault of Pekin and 
the destruction of the Summer Palace. The Tai-Ping re- 
bellion broke out. The Chinese authorities asked for a 
British ofl&cer to command the imperial forces; Gordon was 
nominated. Under his command the forces which were 
called the " ever- victorious " army, deserved their title. 
He carried all before him, annihilated the rebellion, and 
left China as poor as when he had entered it, richer alone 
by the titles which the Emperor insisted upon giving him, 
and by that name of " Chinese Gordon," by which he is 
best known to his fellow-countrymen. For six happy years 
he stayed in Enghuid working at Graveseiid on the con- 
struction of the Thames defenses. " To the world," says 
Mr. Hake, '* his life at Gravesend was a life of self -sup- 
pression and self-denial; to himself it was one of happiness 
and pure j^eace. He lived wholly for others. His house 
was school and hospital and almshouse in turn, and was 
more like the abode of a missionary than of a colonel of 
engineers. The troubles of all interested him alike; the 



EJS'GLAND UNDEE GLADSTONE. _ 283 

poor, the sick, the unfortunate were ever welcome, and 
never did suppliant knock vainly at his door. " In 1874, 
as we have said, he succeeded Sir Samuel Baker in the 
government of the Soudan, after a couple of years of work 
as English commissioner on the Danube. 

General Gordon is a man of strong and peculiar religious 
views; with a fervid Christianity is blended a curiously 
Oriental fatalism, and a fixed belief in the pre-existence of 
the soul. " I think, ^^ he once wrote, '' that this life is 
only one of a series of lives which our incarnated part has 
lived. I have little doubt of our having pre-existed; and 
that also in the time of our pre-existence we were actively 
employed.''^ Everything is preordained, but Heaven is 
still willing to give some sign to those who seek for guid- 
ance. It seems that sometimes General Gordon finds this 
sign in the toss of a coin, and accepts the decision thus 
arrived at with absolute fidelity Whenever, by the cast of 
a coin or otherwise, his mind is made up as to the course 
he is to follow, he will follow that course though it led him 
to his death. General Gordon^ s Christianity is tenderly 
tolerant of other faiths. He is said to have replied to 
John of Abyssinia's question, " You are an Englishman 
and a Christian ?'■' with the answer, " I am an Egyptian 
and a Mussulman. ■*' If General Gordon ever made this 
answer, it is obvious that he only meant what he wrote 
once in another place: " I find the Mussulman quite as 
good a Christian as many a Christian, and do not believe 
that he is in any peril.''' One of his favorite books is the 
" Imitation of Christ.'' He finds consolation and comfort 
in the lofty teachings, the abnegation, and self -contempt 
of the founder of the brotherhood of common life. How 
little really Oriental is in his nature may be found in his 
words upon the future life: '' It must be a life of activity, 
for happiness is dependent upon activity." There is no 
sympathy in his mind with Buddhist Nirvana or Moham- 
medan Paradise. 

Sir Samuel Baker had worked hard to suppress the slave 
trade; this task was now the duty of General Gordon. 
Europeans first, and Arabs after them, had made the 
teeming regions of the Nile one huge slave mart. Chief 
of all the Arab slave-drivers was Zebehr, who came to be 
called '' the scourge of Central Africa." When the Khe- 
dive Ismail tried to put him down he defeated the Khe- 



284 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

dive's army. For a while the Khedive accepted defeat, 
and even took Zebehr as his ally in his invasion of Darfouri 
Once again the Khedive grew alarmed at Zebehr' s strength, 
and resolved to put down him and his slavers. For this 
jnirpose he had sent out Baker; for this purpose he now 
sent out Gordon. For three years Gordon worked in the 
Soudan, opening up the countiy from Cairo to the Lakes, 
and crusliing out the slave trade with an iron hand wherever 
he could. He came back to England in 1876, only to go 
out again with greater powers to the Soudan in 1877. For 
more than two years Gordon toiled, fighting with the prince 
of power of the air almost alone. He worked with the 
strength of ten; he was here, there, and everywhere, 
sweejiing across the desert on his fleet camel, breaking 
alone and unprotected into robber camps, and extorting 
submission from hostile chiefs, upon whose cut- throat 
mercy he was entirely dependent. He seemed to bear what 
old beliefs would have called a charmed life. While disease 
and battle and privation thinned his following, he alone 
went on his way, apparently unconquerable. Zebehr' s son 
rose in desperate revolt, was defeated, captured, and shot 
by Gordon's orders. Zebehr himself was tried in Cairo, 
and sentenced to death, but the sentence was never carried 
out. On the contrary, he received a pension of one hun- 
dred pounds a month, and was suffered to live in honorable 
semi-captivity in Cairo. "When the European Powers 
deposed Ismail Pasha, Gordon left the Soudan* He 
summed up his work in a few words: " I am neither a 
Napoleon nor a Colbert; I do not i)rofess either to have 
been a great ruler or a great financier; but I can say this, 
I have cut off the slave-dealers in their strongholds, and I 
made the people love me." What governor could desire a 
finer record? 

On his return Gordon accepted an appointment as secre- 
tary to Lord Eipon, the new Viceroy of India. While 
people were wondering, grumbling, or rejoicing, according 
to their mood, news came that General Gordon had resigned 
his appointment immediately upon his arrival in India. 
Naturally people wondered still more, but Gordon had 
made a mistake in accepting the post, and he acted wisely 
in throwmg it up the moment he discovered that he had 
made a mistake. He went straight to China, then almost 
on the eve of a war with Russia^ and gave her some coun- 



ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 285 

sels for her future guidance in war in a letter wliicli has be- 
come historical. Ten months were passed in Mauritius as 
commanding Eoyal Engineer; five months were wasted in 
1882^ in South Africa^ striving to settle questions^ while 
all his plans were hampered by the petty policies of inferior 
men. Then at last came a term of rest. He went to the 
East^ to Jerusalem, to study the story of the Bible on its 
own ground, happy and peaceful in his own way for a 
while. 

After Gordon left the Soudan, the comparative order and 
rule he had introduced soon fell to pieces. He left behind 
him able oflScers to cope with the slave-dealers, Gessi Pasha, 
the conqueror of Zebehr's son, Emin Bey, Lupton Bey, 
an Englishman, and others. But Gessi Bey died in the 
Erench hospital in Suez in 1881, of fever caught on the 
Bahr Gazelle River, and the slave-dealers began to hold 
their heads high again. The new Egyptian Government 
reversed Gordon^ s policy, disallowed his subsidies to the re- 
ligious teachers in the Soudan, frowned upon his old offi- 
cials; Turks, Circassians, and Bashi-Bazouks were let slip 
upon the unhappy Soudanese. The condition of tlie coun- 
try was so disgraceful that the outraged inhabitants were 
perfectly justified in rising against the iniquitous rule of 
Cairo. All they wanted was a leader, and suddenly that 
leader appeared among them. Lieutenant- Colonel Stewart 
in his report has drawn a grim picture of the way in which 
the Soudan was harried. The administration of what was 
called justice was fantastically corrupt. Tax-gathering 
was intrusted to Bashi-Bazouks, compared to whom Cos- 
sacks are courteous, and Trenck's Pandours men of light 
and leading. . These taxes were so heavy that famine and 
ruin followed upon their infliction. 

Early in 1881 it was known that a man who proclaimed 
himself as the Mahdi foretold by Mohammed had made his 
appearance in the Soudan, and was declaring a religious 
war against the Egyptian Government, and against all who 
opposed him. Such a proclamation was not in itself very 
surprising. The Mussulman world is always ready for the 
coming of Al-Mahdi, announced by Mohammed, who will 
avenge the blood of slain Mohammedans, and restore the 
reign of righteousness. There have been claimants to the 
position of Al-Mahdi before. There probably will be 
again. It is said that the Sheik Mohammed-as-Sanusy i^ 



286 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

waiting in TrijDoli till he has attained his thirty-ninth year 
to declare himself Al-Mahdi, thirty-nine being the age of 
Mohammed when he began his mission. The Mussulman 
belief in the coming of Al-Mahdi is based, not upon the 
Koran, but upon sayings attributed to the Prophet and to 
his immediate descendants, according to which Al-Mahdi 
must be a descendant of Mohammed, and must accomplish 
various vague and obscure predictions. According to some 
eminent authorities, the true Mahdi was born in the year 
of the Hegira 255, Anno Domini 869, and was shut up in 
a cave by his mother, who still watches over him until the 
apiDointed time, when he shall reapj)ear again to overthrow 
Antichrist, and to join the Christians and Moslems in one 
true faith. 

The new claimant to the authority of Al-Mahdi was a 
native of Dongola, the son of ' a carpenter, by name 
Mohammed Achmet. He had received religious education 
at Khartoum and Berber, and after 1870 set up as a faki 
on his own account. He lived in a cave for a long time in 
the Island of Abba, on the White Nile, and soon became 
famous for his piety. By well-arranged marriages he con- 
trived to ingratiate himself with all the principal tribes, 
and to amass considerable wealth. In May, 1881, he an- 
nounced himself to his brother fakis as Al-Mahdi. The 
title was at once recognized by a large number of chiefs, 
and his ^Dosition was considered sufficiently important to 
arouse considerable alarm at Cairo in the minds of the 
Egyptian Government. The Ulemas of Cairo and Khar- 
toum pronounced again'st him, and an army was dispatched 
to put him down. Not unnaturally the Soudanese recog- 
nized the Mahdi as their champion against the ojopression 
of Egypt, and rallied round his standard in great numbers 
to oppose the unwilling Egyptian levies, raised by proscrip- 
tion. In his first engagements with the Egyptian troops 
the Mahdi was defeated in the south of Sennaar, and re- 
treated up the Blue Nile; but he soon rallied, raised- fresh 
forces, crossed the White Nile, and invaded the Bahr 
Gazelle. In July, 1882, he defeated and massacred six 
thousand Egyptian soldiers under Yussuf Pasha. For 
some months more the Mahdi held his course with varjdng 
fortunes, now winning victories and massacring liis oppo- 
nents, now. being defeated by the Egyptian General Abd-el- 
Kader. In January the town of El Obeid in Kordofau 



EN"GLA2srr) UKBEK GLADSTOKE. ' 287 

capitulated to the MaMi, who took up his residence there, 
and after one or two defeats from Abd-el-Kader it seemed 
as if his influence was entirely limited to Kordofan beyond 
the White Nile. Here it seemed the wisest policy to allow 
him to remain. 

Early in April, 1883, Lord Dufferin, at that time Eng- 
land's representative in Cairo, gave serious advice to Ibra- 
him Bey, the chief of the Bureau appointed by the Egyp- 
tian Government for superintending the affairs of the 
Soudan. He counseled him to recommend the Egyptian 
Government to confine itself to establishing its authority 
over Sennaar, and not to attempt to extend the dominion 
in the Soudan beyond the White Nile. This modest policy 
would. Lord Dutferin urged, greatly diminish the drain on 
the Egyptian treasury, while the substitution of a benefi- 
cent and humane administration for the cruel misgovern- 
ment that had prevailed in Dongola, Khartoum, and 
Sennaar, would, no doubt, lead in time to the easy recovery 
of so much of the abandoned territories as it might be de- 
sirable later to reannex. The Egyptian official listened 
politely, with that bland appearance of acquiescence with 
which Oriental statesmen are so skillful in masking their 
determination to do exactly the opposite of what they are 
being advised to do. Lord Dufferin left Egypt in the firm 
conviction that his policy was being acted upon, and that 
the Egyptian Government would content itself for the time 
with the re-establishment of its authority over Sennaar. 

The Egyptian Government, however, had no thought of 
so contenting itself. They had in their service an English 
officer. General Hicks, who had been successful so far in 
the Soudan operations. They now decided to send him to 
invade Kordofan. England's representative in Egypt at 
this juncture was Sir Edward Malet, who carried the prin- 
ciple of English non-interference in the affairs of Egypt to 
its utmost possible limit. It is truly pitiable to read the 
dispatches and telegrams addressed by Hicks Pasha to Sir 
Edward Malet, whom he very naturally regarded as a power 
in Egypt, imploring him again and again for more author- 
ity, more soldiers, or for permission to withdraw from the 
business altogether. All these communications Sir Ed- 
ward Malet solemnly handed over, one after another, to 
Oherif Pasha, with the same unvarying assurances to the 
Egyptian minister that General Hicks' s action or appeals 



^88 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

were in no sense whatever indorsed by the British Govern- 
ment. General Hicks might write as often as he liked to 
the English representative in Cairo; that functionary 
would do nothing moi'e than hand the letters over to the 
head of the Egyjjtian Ministry, " without any comment or 
expression of o^Hnion " upon their contents. It must be 
admitted, however, that Sir Edward Malet was only the 
mouthj^iece of Lord Granville in this policy of abject irre- 
sponsibility and ludicrous non-interference. The Foreign 
Secretary warned our representative again and again that 
he was to ' ' offer no advice ' ' to the Egyptian Government 
on the question of the Soudan. In other words, though 
England had interfered in Egypt by force of arms to keep 
the Khedive on his throne, though Cairo was occupied by 
English soldiers, though it was clearly in England's power 
and in her right to counsel the Egyptian Ministry as to the 
course they shoidd pursue in the most difficult of all Egyp- 
tian questions, the Ministry still affected to keep up the 
absurd pretense of exercising no influence upon the coun- 
cils of Egypt. 

Hicks Pasha had to obey his orders. With a wretched 
army, insufficient in numbers, deficient in stamina, half 
conquered beforehand by dread of the Soudan and super- 
stitious fear of Al-Mahdi, he crossed the White Nile, and 
marched upon El Obeid. With his army there was, as 
correspondent for the '* Daily News,'' Mr. Edmund 
'Donovan, one of the most remarkable travelers then 
living. Mr. 'Donovan was one of those men who, like 
Mr. Archibald Forbes or Mr. MacGahan, are specially 
made for the trade of war correspondent; men whose love 
of the adventurous is combined with a marvelous capacity 
for carrying their adventure through successfully, of going 
whithersoever they want to go, seeing whatever they want 
to see, and coming back in triumj^h. But Mr. 'Donovan 
had what Mr. Forbes had not — a gift of acquiring foreign 
fongues, and especially Oriental tongues, akin to that of 
Burton of Mecca, of E. H. Palmer, and of Floyer of 
Beloochistan. He was the son of a distinguished Irish 
scholar and author. In his early youth he had taken part 
in the Fenian organization. He became a journalist, then 
a sjjecial correspondent. He first became famous for liis 
ex2iedition to Merv, and for the brilliant letters which he 
wrote to the ' ' Daily News ' ' from that strange Central 



Asian city. The people of Merv made a liero of him: 
*when he at last left them, he went away as their accredited 
representative to all the kingdoms of the world, and they 
only suffered him to go on the solemn assurance that he 
would return, and soon. O^'Donovan made his way to 
Europe; created a sensation in Constantinople by deliver- 
ing his first lecture on Merv there, and by being impris- 
oned for speaking treason against the Sultan in a Pera 
cafe, and so came to London, where he was for a time the 
lion of the season. He stayed in London until he brought 
out his book on Merv. But he soon wearied of civic life, 
and longed to be wandering. When the Soudan trouble 
grew prominent, he offered to go and accompany Hicks 
Pasha" s army for the '' Daily News."" His letters home 
were read with the greatest interest. The sufferings, the 
difficulties, the privations, the dangers of the route of the 
ill-fated army, were brought vividly before London, before 
England, before the world. Gradually the letters grew 
gloomier, more desponding in tone. One of his very last 
letters, dated from the camp of El Duem on September 
23, was written to a private friend, and was not published 
until after the catastrophe. It is a curiously pathetic let- 
ter, the shadow of coming death is upon it. He writes of 
a friend whose death he had just learned, '' I shall sadly 
miss him when I return to London, if ever I do. I am 
writing this under circumstances which bring me as near 
to death as it is possible to be without being under absolute 
sentence of execution, or in the throes of some deadly 

malady, and yet I speak of poor as if L were going to 

live forever. It would be odd if the next intelligence from 
this part of the world told that I, too, had gone the way 
of all flesh. However, to die even out here, with a lance- 
head as big as a shovel through me, will meet my views 
better than the slow, gradual sinking into the grave which 
is the lot of so many. You know I am by this time, after 
an experience of many years, pretty well accustomed to 
dangers of most kinds, even some extra. Yet I assure you 
I feel it terrible to face deadly peril far away from civilized 
ideas, and where no mercy is to be met with, in company 
with cravens that you expect to see run at every moment, 
and who will leave you behind to face the worst. I send 
you a flower plucked from a shrub growing at my tent 
door."" 

10 • / ' 



^90 EKGLAKi) CKDEK GLaDSTOKE. 

The present writer miBt Mr. 0' Donovan for the first time 
in Constantinople at the time when he first arrived as 
*' embassador from Merv," from the Central Asian desert. 
To know him at all was to love him, for 0' Donovan's was 
a singularly lovable nature, and there could be few whose 
aft'ections coald resist his bright, boyish manner, his kind- 
ly, sympathetic spirit, and the strong fascination of his 
brilliant, varied talk, and his animated descriptions of his 
wandering life. He had faults, indeed, which stood some- 
times in his way, which he might have conquered as he 
grew older; but of him we may say in the noble, pathetic 
words of Johnson u23on Goldsmith, ^' He was wild, but he 
is no more.'' The collecting of persoiial relics is, perhaps, 
one of the weakest of human weaknesses, and yet we may 
well be permitted to envy the possessor of the faded flower 
which the hands of a brave man gathered for his friend in 
the desert, in the valley of the shadow of death. 

Hicks Pasha's army never got within sight of the 
minarets of El Obeid. On November 5, 1883, a battle 
took place at Kashgate, and Hicks Pasha's army was liter- 
ally annihilated. The general himself fell fighting brave- 
ly. Mr. 'Donovan was killed near him. No European 
seems to have escaped except a Prussian sergeant, who had 
deserted to the enemy some days before the fight. All the 
Egyptians were massacred. The news was brought to 
Khartoum by a Coptic official, disguised as a dervish, more 
than a fortnight after the event, and was telegraphed on, 
to cause dismay in Cairo and London. The inevitable had 
come to pass,- and the Soudan apjDcared to be irreparably 
lost. 

The jDOsition of the Egyptian garrisons in the Soudan 
was now perilous in the extreme. At Khartoum, where 
the White and Blue Niles branch asunder. Colonel de Coet- 
logen, an English officer, was left with 4000 Egyptians to 
hold a town which would require, in ordinary conditions, a 
far larger force to man its ramparts. Now the conditions 
were not ordinary, for the large black j)opulation of the town 
were expected at any moment to turn upon their nominal 
defenders, and destroy them. At Sinkat, in the Eastern 
Soudan, Tewfik Pasha and a small force were shut up. 
Tokha was besieged, and on the very day after the defeat 
of Kashgate a foi ce of Egyptians, commanded by Captain 
Moncrielf, was surrounded by the rebels* while attempting 



El^GLAKD UKDER GLADSTOKE. 291 

to relieve it, and cut to pieces. At Berber and Dongola, 
at Kassala and Amandel, at Fashoda and Sennaar, there 
were garrisons, not as yet beleaguered, not as yet in imme- 
diate danger, but which might at almost any moment be 
put into immediate danger. What was to be done? The 
Egyptian Government appeared to be paralyzed: so for a 
moment did the English Government. Sir Evelyn Baring 
was now England" s repi'esentative in Cairo. While the 
fate of Hicks Pasha^s army was still uncertain he wrote 
home for instructions. Lord Granville telegraphed that 
the Government could not lend either English or Indian 
troops to assist the Egyptian Government, and advised Sir 
Evelyn Baring, " if consulted,''" to recommend the aban- 
donment of the Soudan within certain limits. ' ' If con- 
sulted T' The absurd pretense was still being kept up that 
the presence of England in Egypt meant nothing, that her 
influence in the councils of Egypt was merely nominal; 
that counsel was never to be volunteered, only given if by 
any chance an independent Egyptian Government might 
ask for it. Even when the news of the defeat of Hicks 
Pasha was certain, even when Ooetlogen was telegraphing 
in desperation from Khartoum that he could not hold the 
place against a hostile population and a victorious rebel, 
with a small army, mostly old and blind, nothing was 
done. Lord Granville could only iterate that " Her Maj- 
esty"s Government could do nothing in the matter which 
would throw upon them the responsibility of ojjerations in 
the Soudan."' The Government which had not hesitated 
to interfere to put down one set of rebels against the Khe- 
dive, were now displaying a ludicrous delicacy about 
interfering to pufc down another set of rebels. Yet the 
danger to the safety of Egypt was at least as great from a 
victorious Mahdi as from a victorious Arabi. Days drifted 
by. The Egyptian Government did nothing; the En- 
glish Government did nothing. Ooetlogen could not 
evacuate Khartoum because the route to Berber was not 
open, and his appeals to have that route opened by a move- 
ment from Berber and Suakim were not answered. Had 
he attempted to do so with the forces at his disposal, he 
would have merely insured a massacre on the road. Sua- 
kim on the Red Sea was only safe because it was protected 
by the presence of British gunboats in the harbor. After 
^ while the Egyptian Government aeemed to make up it§ 



2d 2 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

mind to attempt to hold Khartoum, to open the road to 
Berber, and to call in the aid of Turkish troojDS. The 
English Government saw no objection, as they — this was 
December 13 — had " no intention of employing British or 
Indian troops in the Soudan/' But they recommended 
the abandonment of all territory south of Assouan, or at 
least of Wady Haifa, and they announced that they would 
be prejiared to assist in maintaining order in Egypt proper, 
in defending it, as well as the ports of the Red Sea. At 
last, in the beginning of 188-i, the Government took a de- 
cided tone with the Egyptian Ministry. '^ It is indispensa- 
ble, '^ wrote Lord Granville, ^' that her Majesty's Govern- 
ment should, as long as the provisional occupation of the 
country by English troops continues, he assured that the 
advice which, after full consideration of the Egyptian Gov- 
ernment, they may feel it their duty to tender to the Khe- 
dive should be followed. It should be made clear to the 
Egyptian ministers and governoi-s of the provinces that the 
responsibility which, for the time, rests on England, obliges 
her Majesty's Government to insist on the adojition of the 
policy which they recommend ; and that it will be necessary 
that those ministers and governors who do not follow this 
course should cease to hold their offices." Here was En- 
glish interference with a vengeance. In a moment the 
graceful theories about the independence of Egypt were 
cast to the winds, and a policy of the directest dictation 
adopted. The English Government announced that the 
Soudan must be abandoned, and that some English officer 
of high authority should be sent to Khartoum with full 
powers to make arrangement for the future government of 
the country, and to withdraw all the garrisons. Cherif 
Pasha's Ministry resigned rather than follow out this policy, 
and a new and more supple Ministry was immediately 
formed under Nubar Pasha. Then came the question who 
was to be sent out to Khartoum. 

This point was decided not so much by the Government 
as by the " Pall Mall Gazette. " That enterprising journal 
had decided that General Gordon was the man for Khar- 
toum. He was passing through London on his way from 
Jerusalem to Belgium to take charge of an anti-sla-*. ery ex- 
pedition to the head-waters of the Congo. A representa- 
tive of the *' Pall Mall Gazette" interviewed him, and 
elicited his views oii tjxe situation. Then, day after day, 



EKGLAI^D UNDEK GLADSTONE. 293 

the " Pall Mall " insisted that General Gordon should be 
sent to settle the affairs of the Soudan. The idea was taken 
up by every one^ even by the Government, and in the end 
the Government decided to send him out. He was actually 
on his way to Belgium to arrange about the Congo expedi- 
tion, when he was recalled and ordered to the Soudan. 
With the promptness which has always characterized him 
he set off at once. Tiie mission he was sent on was in 
direct opposition to his own ideas. He was not in favor of 
the abandonment of the Soudan or the evacuation of Khar- 
toum. He was sent out to facilitate the evacuation of 
Khartoum and the abandonment of the Soudan. In his 
own expressive phrase, he was sent '' to cut the dog^s tail 
off.^^ There are few events m the contemporary history 
more thrilling that this expedition of General Gordon's. 
He hastened to Egypt in company with Colonel Steward, 
an English officer with great knowledge of the East, whom 
he had chosen as his companion. He appeared for a mo- 
ment in Cairo, where he had an angry interview with his 
old enemy Zebehr, who refused to be reconciled. Then he 
disappeared into the desert. For a time he was absolutely 
lost to sight. He would only go with an army or go alone; 
and as there was no army to give him, he went practically 
alone upon his terribly dailgerous mission. The eyes of 
the world may be said to have been fixed upon the desert 
tract which General Gordon was crossing on his swift 
dromedary. At last it was known that he had arrived in 
safety at Khartoum, and that so far all was well. Gordon 
was received by the population of Khartoum with the great- 
est enthusiasm. They hailed him as Sultan, Father, and 
Savior of Kordofan. He at once proceeded to simplify 
the situation in his prompt, imperious manner. All the 
Government books recording the debts of the overtaxed 
people, all the whips and other instruments of oppression, 
were solemnly burned before the palace. The prison was 
visited, the different cases examined into, and most of the 
prisoners released. Colonel de Coetlogen was thanked for 
his services, and told that there was no further need of his 
m-esence.. ''Rest assured you leave this place as safe as 
Kensington Park,'' wrote Gordon to him. 

Gordon immediately issued a series of proclamations, 
each perhaps more surprising than the others. He began 
by proclaiming the Mahdi as Sultan of Kordofan, an act 



294 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

of conciliation which did not have the immediate effect of 
bringing the warlike i^rophet to terms. Another proclama- 
tion directly and emphatically sanctioned slavery in the 
Soudan. Gordon was exceedingly anxious to appoint 
Zebehr as ruler of Khartoum and the country around, but 
the Home Government would not consent to the appoint- 
ment. It was bad enough to be compelled to recognize 
slavery in the Soudan after all the heroic, helpless efforts 
that had been made to put it down, but to consent to the 
appointment of the very head and front of the slave-drivers 
as ruler of the country was more than they could stomach. 
People began to ask themselves if General Gordon had 
taken leave of his senses in sanctioning slavery, and seek- 
ing a ruler for Khartoum in the " scourge of Central 
Africa. '^ He had not taken leave of his senses; he was 
sent oat to perform a certain task, and he at once recog- 
nized the only conditions on vrhich that task could be per- 
formed. It was useless to prohibit slavery if we did not 
intend to enforce the prohibition. If we would not govern 
the Soudan, we ought to intrust it to some one who could; 
and of all men Zebehr seemed to Gordon the most capable 
for the purpose. Gordon did not like Zebehr; he had de- 
scribed him often enough as one of the curses of the coun- 
try; but neither did Gordon like evacuating the Soudan. 
If the one dislike had to be swallowed, there was no use in 
making a wry face over the other. Zebehr was said to be 
delighted at the proposal. He had a blood feud with Gor- 
don — over this they had quarreled during the Cairo inter- 
view. But with the prospect of becoming ruler of Khar- 
toum he forgot all about the blood feud. Gordon was his 
brother; he himself was a much-injured and shamefully 
maligned man. In terms that would be grotesquely comic 
if. the situation had not been so serious, Zebehr declared 
that he hated slavery, that he had never had anything 
whatever to do with the slave trade. It seemed that Gor- 
don and the world in general had been much mistaken 
about Zebehr all this while; that he was in reality a sort of 
Central African Wilberforce, the very man whom Mr. 
Chesson and the Aboriginal Society ought to hold in spe- 
cial regard. However, the Government were not con- 
vinced, and they declined to sanction the appointment of 
Zebehr. The refusal was curious. If they were willing to 
lend themselves to any juggling with the slave trade, if 



EKCILAKD UNDER GLADSTOKE. 295 

their one aim on earth was to get out of the Soudan at any 
cost^ and with any sacrifice of principle, it is difficult to see 
why they were so resolute in opposition to Zebehr. Gor- 
don's chances of success in his task depended, too, very 
largely upon his having a free hand; and if he advised the 
appointment of Zebehr, he undoubtedly did so after due 
consideration of the difficulty of the situation. However, 
the Government would have none of Zebehr, and Gordon's 
difficulties began to thicken. The insurgent tribes did not 
display that eagerness to rally round him which was at first 
expected. We hear of another proclamation of Gordon's, 
this time somewhat angry in tone, threatening the recusants 
with prompt punishment if they do not make peace; and 
there is talk of sending for British forces. Shortly after 
this proclamation telegraphic communication with Khar- 
toum is cut off, and for a time General Gordon and his 
doings are involved in complete darkness. At intervals 
the veil lifts. The messengers succeed in making their 
way out with the news that General Gordon has been* en- 
gaged in conflict with the rebels, has been victorious; but 
that more rebels remain unconquered — that, in fact, Khar- 
toum is surrounded. Then the veil drops again. Colonel 
de Coetlogen arrived in Cairo on March 24, having made 
his way from Khartoum, after Gordon's " Kensington 
Park" assurance, without any difficulty. He considered 
that the place could be easily taken by the enemy, but 
doubted whether there was any immediate danger. Gen- 
eral Gordon's plan was to get the garrison away, hand over 
his own to the best native authority available, and with- 
draw. The southern garrisons were supposed to be making 
for the coast. Colonel de Coetlogen 's news was not very 
reassuring, but it was all that was to be had. Nothing was 
to be done but to remember Gordon's own words before 
leaving London, '* No panic," and wait upon events. Ac- 
cording to Colonel de Coetlogen it would be impossible to 
send a relieving army to Khartoum even if Gordon wished 
it, and Gordon did not wish it. 

In the meantime the condition of the beleaguered garri- 
sons at Tokha and Sinkat was growing desperate. Mes- 
sages came from Tewfik telling piteous tales of the distress 
to which his gallant little garrison was reduced by priva- 
tion. The Egyptian Government "sent Baker Pasha, with 
what they were pleased to call an army, to Suakim, in 



296 EKGLAKD UKDER GLADSTOKE. 

order to attempt the relief of the garrisons. His force was 
composed chiefly of fellaheen, raised by conscription, many 
of them brought into Cairo in chains — these were called vol- 
unteers — all unwilling to go into the dreaded Soudan. 
With such men as these — as feeble as, nay, far more feeble 
than the levies of Tel-el-Kebir — Baker Pasha was expected 
to set free the imprisoned garrisons, and defeat the Mahdi's 
fierce lieutenant in the eastern Soudan, Osman Digna. On 
February 4 General Baker advanced from Trinkitat to re- 
lieve 'J'okha. His force numbered in all oOOO men, most 
of them Egyptians, though some were black troops. A 
handfid of English officers accompanied him. Colonel 
Burnaby — Burnaby of Khiva — was with him, utilizing his 
leave by hurrying to the spot where there was promise of 
excitement, of danger. The war correspondents of the 
chief London papers of course rode with the relieving force. 
In the present day the position of the war correspondent is 
scarcely less perilous than that of the soldier in the van. 
The enemy came soon in sight; there was some skirmishing 
with the advanced cavalry; then a wild attack was made 
by the Arabs upon the Egyptians. An attempt had been 
made by the officers to make the square formation, but the 
ill-drilled, untrained, timorous Egyptians were unable to 
keep their ranks. In sheer panic they broke and fled. 
From tliat moment the fortune of the fight was settled. 
The Arabs carried everything before tJiem, and swept furi- 
ously after the flying Egyptians, stabbing and spearing 
the fugitives without mercy. The miserable feilaheen 
could not even fight for their lives; when they were over- 
taken by their fleet pursuers they would fail on their knees 
and receive the cmq) de grace meekly, with clasped hands. 
Baker Pasha, Colonel Burnaby, and his stafl" made a des- 
perate effort to save the day, trying to rally their men, and 
even shooting some of the nearest fugitives. It was all in 
vain. Before the savage fury of the Arabs, the manhood, 
such as it was, of the Egyptians literally withered away, 
and the Prophet himself could not have rallied them then 
had he appeared among them. They fled and fell all along 
the way back to Trinkitat. Some European officers who 
stood by the guns were cut down after fighting desperately. 
When it was certain that there was no hope, General Baker, 
Colonel Burnaby, and their companions rode right through, 
the surrounding Arabs unharmed, and made their way to 



ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 297 

Trinkitat, where they exerted themselves heroically to 
pacify the panic-stricken runaways, and to get the troops 
on board— a task in which they received no assistance from 
the unfortunate Egyptian officers. Luckily for the rem- 
nant who escaj^ed the rout, the Arabs did not push their 
victory to Trinkitat, deterred no doubt by the fear of the 
British gunboats, or probably not one man would have 
escaped from that day^s business. Many gallant deeds 
were done, many thrilling tales are told of acts of indi- 
vidual bravery, in that wild flight. One officer, .Major 
Harvey, put his wounded servant upon his own horse and 
brought him out of danger, holding the horse by the bridle 
and running alongside of it. 

The defeat at Teb practically settled the question of 
English interference in the Soudan. General Baker was, 
indeed, only an English officer in the Egyptian service, 
but it was impossible to expect that the insurgent Arabs 
would understand this important distinction. All that 
they would consider was that now for the third time the 
armies of the Mahdi or his lieutenant had met a hostile 
army arrayed under the leadership of English officers, and 
defeated them hopelessly. In every bazaar in the East, 
from Constantinople to Smyrna, in every Nilotic mud tow^n 
between Assouan and Cairo, in every Mussulman com- 
munity in Hindostan, in every Central Asian Khanate, the 
news would fly that the arms of England were falling into 
the dust before the green banner of Islam.^ England had 
fought Arabi before on the ground that she must preserve 
her road to India; if she wished to preserve her prestige in 
those Mohammedan countries which she ruled, she must 
fight and conquer Osman Digna now. At home in Eng- 
land the greatest excitement prevailed. The news of Baker 
Pasha ^s defeat had arrived on the very day that Parliament 
met. The following day came the news that Tewfik Pasha, 
the gallant defender of Sinkat, had been cut to pieces with 
his valiant garrison, in an attempt to force their way 
through the besiegers' lines. The story was doubted at 
first, but it was soon verified. Logically the fate of the 
Soudan garrisons entailed no responsibility on England. 
She had not put them there; their blood would not be upon 
her head. But England had chosen to interfere in the 
affairs of Egypt; nay, more, she had insisted that the Sou- 
dan should be aba^cloned; it was her duty to see that th^ 



208 EJS'GLAKD UNDER GLADSTONE. 

unhappy garrisons were not left to perish in obedience to 
that dictation. She had compelled the Egyptian ruler, 
sorely against his will, to give up the Soudan; it was her 
mission to insure the accomplishment of the task without 
the sacrifice of lives periled in obedience to another policy 
and another principle. It was clear that the feeling of the 
vast bulk of public opinion in England was in favor of 
doing something to settle the Soudan question, to rescue 
the imperiled garrisons, and to retrieve the shaken prestige 
of England. The time for inaction had gone by; it never 
had had any logical excuse from the day when Admiral 
Beauchamp Seymour opened fire upon the Alexandria 
forts. In defiance of all the principles and all the tradi- 
tions of Liberalism, a Liberal Government had intervened 
between a foreign ruler and a foreign rebel. They had 
lent the arms and the influence of England to crush the 
National movement in Egypt, and for the moment they 
had crashed it. It was a blunder, and like most blunders 
it entailed other blunders to follow it. It was impossible 
for the Government to sit any longer with folded hands and 
watch Egypt falling to pieces before their eyes. The 
memory of Tel-el-Kebir forbade them to regard El Teb as 
an Egyptian matter to be settled by Egyptian measures 
and an Egyptian Ministry. 

On Sunday, February 10, it was proclaimed at Suakim 
that Admiral Hewitt, with the consent of England and at 
the request of the Khedive, had assumed the supreme con- 
trol, and that England had undertaken to defend Suakim. 
On Monday, the 18th, the " Jumna " steamed through the 
reefs of Suakim harbor, the largest ship that had ever en- 
tered its waters, with the 10th Hussars (Baker Pasha's old 
regiment) on board, and the Irish Fusiliers. On Friday, 
the 24th, General Graham himself arrived, just in time to 
hear the news that Tokha, after long holding out, had sur- 
rendered to the enemy, and that the garrison and rebels 
had fraternized. Osman Digna's star seemed to be in the 
ascendant. An Austrian merchant of Suakim, Mr. Levi, 
who got into Osman's camp under the pretense of becom- 
ing a Mussulman, and who only escaped with difficulty 
with his life from his perilous adventure, described the 
Mahdi's lieutenant as a common-looking man, dressed in a 
dirty shirt and straw hat, who spent most of his time in 
exciting his followers by reading to them ■ religious books 



IIHGLAKD UKDER GLADSTOiq-E. 299 

about the Malidi, with comments of his own. Undoubted- 
ly Osman possessed the power of inspiring his followers 
with an implicit belief in him and his cause. He scorn- 
fully rejected all overtures of truce, and announced that he 
was determined to sweep Suakim into the Eed Sea, with 
every soul it contained, whether Egyptian or English. 
This was the man whom it was General Graham^ s duty to 
put down, now that it was too late to do anything for Sin- 
tat or Tokha. 

On the last day of February General Graham^ s force, 
some four thousand strong, began its march from Trinki- 
tat. Five hundred yards to the windward side of the spot 
where the decomposing corpses of Baker Pasha^s Egyptians 
lay in hideous confusion by hundreds, the Arabs attacked 
the British, opening fire upon them with the Krupp guns 
they had captured at El Teb. A splinter from one of the 
shells wounded Baker Pasha badly in the face, but he in- 
sisted on going on as soon as his wound was bound up. 
About three miles from Eort Baker the enemy had set up 
some kind of earthwork, on which guns were mounted, 
over which their flags were flying. On these earthworks 
the British advanced steadily, the Gordon Highlanders 
leading the way to the shrill tune of their bagpipes, and 
marching as coolly as if on parade. There was a short 
artillery duel, and then the British charged the earthworks 
and carried all before them. Colonel Burnaby was one of 
the first over the parapet, firing at the Arabs with a double- 
barreled gun, and receiving some ugly wounds. The 
Arabs fought heroically, flinging themselves again and 
again upon the British line, falling in hundreds before the 
rain of bullets and the bayonet charge. Even when defeat 
was inevitable, they would not acknowledge it, but retired 
sullenly, fighting to the last, often making wild charges 
upon certain death with undaunted heroism. The next 
day General Graham continued his march and took posses- 
sion of Tokha. 

Though the ostensible purpose of the expedition had been 
accomplished by tlie relief — too late, indeed — of Tokha, 
military operations were not suspended. Osman Digna's 
followers were called upon to abandon him and disperse. 
Osman Digna had retired to his encampment at Tamanieb, 
and, as his followers still held by him, and he himself was 
still defiant, it was determined to advance against him. 



'>(j() EKGLAKD UNDER GLADSTOKE. 

On the early morning of Tlmrsday, March 13, General 
Graham's army marched out against Osman Digna's eh- 
cam.pment, in the military formation of two squares. The 
ground was thick with bush, and afforded every opportu- 
nity for the concealment of the enemy, who undoubtedly 
succeeded in drawing the first square into what was very 
like an ambuscade. The wild Arab attack was for the 
moment irresistible, the order of the advancing square was 
broken, a sea of Arabs broke in upon it, stabbing and 
spearing. The British fired and retreated, fighting desper- 
ately, and leaving their guns in the enemy's hands. For 
a moment it seemed as if the day was lost, as if the massa- 
cre of the first battle of Teb would be repeated, with Brit- 
ish instead of Egyptian soldiers for victims. Only for a 
moment, however. The second square had j^reservcd its 
formation perfectly, and came to the rescue of the first, 
which was already rallying from its first fatal shock. A 
few minutes more of desperate fighting, and the day so 
nearly lost was won, the Arabs were in full retreat, the 
captured guns retaken. General Graham pushed on to 
Osman Digna's encampment and destroyed it. 

After this second victory Admiral Hewitt issued a proc- 
lamation offering a reward of five thousand dollars for the 
capture of Osman Digna, dead or alive. This extraordi- 
nary manifesto, based upon principles of war that had 
been abandoned for centuries, aroused the utmost surprise 
in England. At first the Government refused to believe 
in its authenticity; the moment it was confirmed orders 
were telegraphed for its immediate withdrawal. Osman 
Digna was as much the undoubted commander of the in- 
surgent Arabs as Admiral Hewitt was commander at Sua- 
kim. He had shown himself, up to this time, a brave, 
resolute, and dauntless soldier, fighting for a cause which 
had commanded a very large amount of sympathy in Eng- 
land and all over the civilized world. Even liis alleged 
execution of two messengers sent to him by Admiral 
Hewitt did not justify the Admiral in offering what was 
practically a reward for his assassination. Admiral Hewitt 
no doubt believed himself to be acting within his right; it 
is one of the unfortunate necessities of savage warfare that 
it seems to deaden the moral sense and warp the conduct 
of the bravest men, till they begin to act. against their op- 
ponents upon the princii^les of savage, not of civilized, 



EKGLAHt) UHDER GLABSTOKE. 301 

morality. The issue of the proclamation was most unfort- 
unate, and even its immediate withdrawal could not efface 
its recollection or prevent it from doing harm to the British 
cause. 

One further advance finally dispersed Osman Digna^s re- 
maining adherents, and then, to the surprise of every one 
and to the dismay of most. General Graham was ordered 
to retire, to embark his troops with all speed, and, in fact, 
to get out of the country as quickly as possible. General 
Gordon had asked for two squadrons of cavalry to be sent 
to Berber to open a way of escape for two thousand women 
and children sent down from Khartoum. This request 
was not granted; Sir Evelyn Baring angered Gordon by 
talking of negotiations with Arabs to open the road. To 
the outer world, not learned- in the secrets of Ministerial 
policy, it looked grimly like leaving General Gordon to his 
fate. Just then, too. General Gordon" s position was pecul- 
iarly critical. The veil that hid the doings at Khartoum 
had again lifted, and the world had to learn another lesson 
of defeat. General Gordon had sallied out from Khartoum 
on March 16 to attack the followers of the Mahdi who had 
assembled on the opposite bank of the river, opposite to 
the windows of the palace. After a short conflict Gordon's 
troops, Egyptians of the kind who fled from Baker at the 
first battle of Teb, broke and ran in helpless panic, almost 
without firing a shot. The successful Arabs seem to have 
been some sixty in number; Gordon's army more than a 
thousand. Gordon ""s force lost some two hundred men in 
their mad flight; about four of the victorious Arabs are 
said to have been killed. It is only fair to say that the 
panic was partly due to the treachery of two black pashas 
under Gordon's command, Hassan and Said, whom Colonel 
de Ooetlogen had formerly suspected of treachery. They 
gave the signal for flight by galloping back from the enemy, 
they broke up the square of their own men, and they, with 
their own hands, killed some of their own artillerymen. 
When the troops routed got back to Khartoum General 
Gordon hM the two pashas arrested, tried by court-martial, 
and shot. To add to Gordon's difficulties, the Mahdi 
wholly refused to be mollified by Gordon's offer of the 
Sultanship of Kordofan. Three dervishes arrived in Khar- 
toum, bearing back the robes of honor sent by Gordon. 
With their hands upon their swords they delivered their 



')02 EKC4LAN1) UNDER (iLADSTOKE. 

message, and called upon Gordon in the Mahdi^s name to 
become a Mussulman, and to put on the robe of a dervish. 
With Gordon in this position, defeat outside Khartoum, 
and treason within the walls, the Government ordered the 
withdrawal of the British troops from Suakim. To the 
looker-on at the political game the order appears an act of 
inexplicable folly. Was it worth while to send out an army 
to the Red Sea littoral, merely to slaughter a few thousand 
Arabs and then come back again? Did the Government 
thijik that a conple of inevitable defeats of Osman Digna 
settled the Soudan difficulty? Not to have gone to the 
Soudan at all would have been intelligible enough; but to 
comjilicate the matter stil^ further by going, by having a 
battue of Arabs, and then hurriedly coming away again, 
seemed a policy only worthy of the Duke of York in the 
nui'sery rhyme, and not of a serious and responsible Minis- 
try. 

Just at the moment when the Ministry were most per- 
plexed by the difficulties in Egypt, most harassed by the 
pertinacity of the attacks of the Opposition, a new element 
of trouble was introduced into their situation. Late in 
February it was made known that Merv had become a part 
of the ever-increasing Russian dominion in Central Asia. 
The news was absolutel}^ unexpected. Russia had given a 
sort of vague understaiiding that she would not go to Merv, 
which had quieted even the most suspicious of Central 
Asian alarmists. But Russia had in no sense pawned her 
future conduct in the case of Merv coming to her — and 
Merv had come to her. Of their own accord, so the ac- 
count ran, with no prompting, no instigation, the people 
of Merv had voluntarily desired to be enrolled in the long 
list of foreign races who recognize the Czar as their father. 
Russia had accepted the trust thus offered her, and Merv 
was henceforward part and parcel of the Russian Empire. 
The news aroused the fiercest indignation against Russia 
the deceiver, and the deceived English Ministry, in the 
minds of all those who saw in Russia's action in Central 
Asia part of a plot with our Indian Empire for its object. 

What is generally called the Central Asian question 
means, when translated, the relative positions of Russia 
and England in those districts of Central Asia that lie be- 
tween Russia and the English Empire in India. It may 
be very happily expressed in a quotation from Mr. 



EKGLAKD UNDER GLADSTOKE. 303 

Mackenzie Wallace: ^* It is pretty certain that the Russian 
and British frontiers in Central Asia will some day meet. 
Where they will depends upon ourselves. If we do not 
wish our rival to overstep a certain line, we must ourselves 
advance to that line.'^ As to the point where the two 
frontiers are to meet, there are two distinct schools of 
politicians. The one school maintains that it is not for us 
to concern ourselves with the advance of Russia. If she 
chooses to aggrandize her empire among the petty khanates 
of Central Asia, that is her affair, not ours; nor need we 
stir ourselves to meet an imaginary danger on our Indian 
frontier until Russia makes some distinctly overt act of 
aggression. The other school upholds a directly contrary 
doctrine. It sees in Russians steady advance a distinct 
threat against the integrity of our Indian Empire, a 
steady, measured accomplishment of the will of Peter the 
Great, which, whether authentic or not, represents excel- 
lently the purposes of the Russian people, a,nd the ambitions 
of Russian statesmen. It is not, therefore, for England to 
wait, this school urges, until Russia, having accomplished 
her aims and undermined our strength, abandons her 
stealthy encroachment and avowedly menaces our power in 
India. Home of the arguments on this side are thus put 
by Mr. Marvin: 

"' The Central Asian question, as it at present stands, 
resolves itself into this : In a very short space of time the em- 
pires of EngMnd and Russia in Central Asia will touch each 
other: query, Where shall the frontier line be drawn? ... 
Should Russia succeed in establishing a regular water-way 
between the Black Sea and the Caspian, and thence, by 
means of the Oxus, across the desert to Bokhara and 
Afghanistan, it is obvious that the river Oxus will acquire 
immense commercial importance; because it will tap the 
trade of Central Asia. . . . We said for years that Russia 
should 7iever annex Khiva: she has got it. We said she 
should never domineer over Kashgar: her troops to-day not 
only occupy passes a few marches from the city, but by the 
treaty signed by Tchoon Kow in 1879, Russia has the right 
to establish agents throughout Eastern Turkestan, from 
which we ourselves are excluded. We said that Persia 
should always be preserved from encroachment: the Shah 
to-day wears a Cossack's uniform, and the Atrek region 
is becoming a second Turkestan. We said that Russia 



304 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

should never repossess Bessarabia and the mouth of the 
Danube. We said that Batouni, the 'best port on the Cau- 
casian coast, sliould never become a Russian prize. We 
said that Kars, the key of Asia Minor, should never fall 
into the hands of the Muscovite. Yet these three great 
possessions were secretly signed away to Russia by Lord 
Salisbury. ' ' 

Undoubtedly, too, a great many English statesmen had 
always been saying, a great many English politicians always 
been urging, that Russia should never get Merv, and now 
undoubtedly she had got it too. Any one who takes up 
the sketch map of the advances of Russia in Central Asia 
m ^' Caj^tain Bnrnaby\s ride to Khiva '^ has practically the 
Central Asian question before him. He will see what the 
Russian frontier was in 1836, and how steadily it has been 
advancing luster by luster, and decade by decade, absorbing 
into its huge empire the wealthy states and independent 
provinces of Central Asia. Early in the j)resent century 
Russia had extendel her realm far out into Western 
Siberia, till the whole of that vast country came into the 
Russian joower. On the other side she reached down from 
Orenburg to Orsk, and the north of the sea of Aral to Fort 
Perovsky. The cession of some of the best pasture lands 
of the Kirghiz of the Little Horde to Cossacks roused re- 
taliatioji on the part of the Central Asian nomads, and 
these acts of retaliation were made the excuse for fresh ad- 
vances on the part of conquering Russia. Khokhand and 
Khiva took the alarm, and prepared to meet the advancing 
Muscovites with arms. They made frequent raids upon 
the newly acquired Russian territory, and the Russians in 
return occupied their stronghold of Ak-Mechet, which was 
thenceforward called Fort Perovsky from the successful 
general. At Kasala, and on the sites of two other Kho- 
khand forts, were built Russian forts, Nos. 1, 3 and 3. 

The Crimean War which broke out interrupted for a sea- 
son the advance of Russia. But only for a season. With 
the 20 reclamation of peace Russians ambition again asserted 
itself, and the preparations for the conquests of Khokhand 
and Bokhara were resumed. In 1864 General Tchernaieff 
took possession of Chemkent, and a little later conquered, 
wdth some difficidty, the large town of Tashkend, quite in 
defiance of I*i'ince Gortscihakoft'^s famous dispatch, which 
pointed out to the Central Asian states that '^ Russia is not 



EIS'GLAHB UKDEE GLADSTOKE. 305 

);heir enemy, that she entertains toward them no ideas of 
conquest, and that peaceful and commercial relations will 
be more profitable than reprisals and permanent warfare. " 
It was explained that Eussia was serving the interests of 
civilization and humanity, and had the right to count on 
an equitable and loyal appreciation of the steps which it 
took, and the principles by which it was guided. In pur- 
suance of this policy, the next step of General Tchernaieff ' 
was to capture Fort Niazbek, and further to storm, and 
finally capture, Tashkend on July 14, 1865. 

The ambitious general then turned his thoughts to the 
conduct of the Ameer of Bokhara, who had the audacity to 
act upon Eussian principles, and occupy the town of Hod- 
jent. General Tchernaieff ordered all the Bokharans in 
the district he governed to be arrested. The Ameer retali- 
ated by arresting all the Eussian merchants who happened 
to be in his city; but he did not so far gratify Tchernaieff's 
purposes as to declare war. On the contrary, he sent a 
mission to St. Petersburg to remonstrate against the action 
of the Eussian governor. The mission was met at Fort 
No. 1 by General Kryzhanovsky, who refused to allow the 
mission to go to St. Petersburg, and detained the embassy. 
Then General Tchernaieff sent a Eussian mission to Bok- 
hara. The Ameer thoug:ht it would be only appropriate to 
retaliate by arresting the Eussian agent. What Eussia 
might do to Bokhara, Eussia was not prepared to allow 
Bokhara to do to her, and Tchernaieif promptly marched 
against the Ameer. A battle ensued, in which the Eussian 
general had distinctly the worst of it. He was recalled, 
and his place taken by General Eomonovsky, through 
whose fairer fortunes the army of the Ameer was cut to 
pieces, and the Ameer himself had to fly for safety to 
Samarcand. The Ameer proposed peace, but Eussia de- 
manded an immense indemnity. Bokhara refused to pay, 
and General Kauffmann, who had replaced Eomonovsky 
in 1867, invaded the country, and after a fierce struggle 
Bokhara passed under Eussian rule. Kauffmann, who died 
on May 12, 1882, without accomplishing his ambition of 
seeing all Central Asia, including Afghanistan, under Eus- 
sian rule, was the most enterprising of all the Central 
Asian invaders, with the exception of Skobeleff, who only 
survived him by not quite two months. The next step 
was to annex Khokhand, Khokhand was perfectly friend- 



30G ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

ly to Russia; but, nevertheless, to the far-seeing Russian 
mind it wanted Russianizing. Some sixty natives of the 
phice were induced to petition for annexation to Russia, 
and their request was promptly acceded to. In 1873 Rus- 
sia had made her preparations for an expedition to Kash- 
gar, then held by Yakoob Beg, but the dispatch of an En- 
glish embassy to his State interfered with the Russian 
plans, and the expedition was countermanded. Since 
then the Chinese have reconquered Kashgar. Yakoob 
Beg has died, and Eastern Turkestan has practically be- 
come again a Chinese province. Then came Kauffmann's 
expedition, which brought Khiva under Russian authority. 
Merv was the next step in the logical completeness of Rus- 
sian advance, and that step has now been taken. 

What Russia thinks of the Central Asian question has 
been told us — and very frankly told us — by Madame Olga de 
Novikolf, in a communication to the " Pall Mall Gazette" 
— every one communicates with the ' ' Pali Mall Gazette. " 
*^ Our position is clear," says Madame de Novikoff. 
" North of the Oxus, outside the boundaries of Afghanis- 
tan, Russia has a free hand. She will advance or retreat, 
establish garrisons, or agents, or residents, annex or pro- 
tect, or do whatever she pleases, according to the dictates 
of her own interests and the interests of her Asiatic sub- 
jects. We shall soon do our duty without asking anybody's 
leave, and we shall as soon think of making explanations 
about the occupation of Merv as England did about the oc- 
cupation of Candahar." "Russia, I hope," Madame de 
Novilcoif goes on to say, " has definitely broken with the 
foolish habit of giving assurances whenever the English get 
into a fidget about our advances. A rising tide can as soon 
be controlled by Canute as the Russian advance, even by 
imperial declarations. Autocrats are not almighty, and 
circumstances are stronger than emperors. The most im- 
perative orders have been issued in vain. The same law 
that forced England from Calcutta to Khyber has driven 
us from Orenburg to Merv. 

' Es ist cine alte Gescliichte, 
Doch bleibt sie immer neu,' 

as Heine says on some other occasion, not referring exactly 
to the Oxus." Here we have an exposition of Russian 
policy in Central Asia, freely and frankly put forward by 



EKGLAKB UKDER GLADSTOKE. 307 

one who has every right to speak with authority. The 
argument is clear enough: " We Eussians have done once 
for all with explanations and assurances. We are going 
to do as we like with the Central Asian states^ with the 
exception of Afghanistan. There we recognize England^ s 
right to exert her influence. But elsewhere;, whether at 
Bokhara or Samarcand, or Khiva, or Merv, from the fair- 
est city of the proudest khan to the humblest aoul of the 
Akkal Tekkes, we intend to act as we choose, responsible 
to ourselves, and to ourselves alone. ^ ' Taken as it was, it 
was an honest and open declaration, and as such it was 
well worth having. Henceforward, any reproaches ad- 
dressed to Russia would not be merely vain — they would be 
ridiculous. 



CHAPTER XVL 

THE REFOEM BILL. 

The session opened on Tuesday, Eebruary 5, 1884 The 
Queen ^s speech spoke of harmonious relations with foreign 
Powers, of the settlement of the Madagascar difficulty, of 
the Congo question, of commercial treaties or revision of 
treaties with Turkey, Spain, Japan, and Corea. The con- 
dition of Egypt was described without comment; a favor- 
able issue to the Transvaal question was hoped for. Ire- 
land was said to continue to exhibit features of substantial 
improvement. The address in reply to the speech from 
the Throne was moved and seconded by Lord Tweeddale 
and Lord Vernon in the Lords, and Mr. Eliot and Mr. 
Samuel Smith in the Commons. These speeches of cere- 
mony, chiefly remarkable for the hopeful view they ex- 
pressed of the Egyptian question, were still going on in the 
Lords, and had not begun in the Commons, when the news 
arrived that Baker Pasha^s miserable little army for the 
relief of Tokha had been fallen upon by the hostile chief 
Osman Digna and cut to pieces. 

The reception of this news produced very different effects 
in the two Houses. In the Tipper House Lord Salisbury 
was inspired by the *' sinister news '' to make a fierce and 
comprehensive attack upon the complacent optimism of 
the Queen^s speech. The attack was too comprehensive. 
Pindar said of the fair poetess Erinna^ that she sowed with 



308 EKGLAKD UKDER GLADSTONE. 

the sack, and not with tlie hand; that she showered the 
niytliological alhisions, of wliich Pmdar himself was so 
profligate, with needless prodigality. Lord Salisbury 
sowed his charges against the Ministry with the sack rather 
than the hand. There was, as Lord Granville said after- 
ward, a want of chiaroscuro in Lord Salisbury's picture of 
the depravity of the Government. On the Egyptian ques- 
tion, undoubtedly. Lord Salisbury had a fine theme for at- 
tack. The Egj^ptian policy of the Government was almost 
defenseless, but the attack came with exceptionally bad 
grace from the lips of Lord Salisbury. Many of the Gov- 
ernment's misfortunes were due to the lamentable weak- 
ness which had prevented them from breaking away at once 
from the foreign policy of their predecessors. For that 
policy Lord Salisbury and his party were responsible, and 
what they attacked the Ministry for doing was the miser- 
able but legitimate conclusion of their own principles and 
their own practice. 

But Lord Salisbury ignored all such responsibility. His 
method was like that of the theatrical manager in the 
story, who divided the history of the world into two parts, 
the period of sandals and the i3eriod of bulf boots. Every- 
thing went well in Egypt in the epoch of sandals — in the 
time, that is, of Lord BeaconsfiekFs administration. Every- 
thing went ill with Egypt in the age of buff boots — that 
is, in the time of Mr. Gladstone's administration. Lord 
Granville had no great difficulty in answering such a speech 
with cool, good-humored, slightly contemptuous argument. 
But it would have taken an abler man than Lord Granville 
to make the Egyptian policy of the Government appear a 
presentable and creditable policy just then. 

The news of the Soudan disaster produced what may be 
called a political catastrophe in the Lower House. The 
speeches moving the address in the Commons were char- 
acterized by the same complacent optimism with regard to 
Egypt, which undoubtedly did seem ludicrous, if not horri- 
ble, in the face of the news that had just come in. But 
speeches in support of an address are more or less set per- 
formances, rehearsed beforehand, and quite too unwi'eldy 
to be adapted to unexpected emergencies. The Govern- 
ment, in the person of the mover and seconder of the ad- 
dress, congratulated itself upon a speedy solution of Egyp- 
tian troubles, while every man in the House who was listen- 



EHaLAK^B tlKBEB GLABSTOKE. 309 

iiig to the debate knew that one of the most important 
events of the whole disastrous campaign had just taken 
place, and that the blow which had been dealt at English 
prestige in Egypt by the defeat of Baker Pasha had no less 
surely struck a heavy blow at the very existence of the Gov- 
ernment. When the seconder of the address had sat down, 
Mr. Bourke rose to move an amendment, condemning the 
Egyptian policy of the Ministry. In a speech quite as tell- 
ing as Lord Salisbury % Mr. Bourke made his long series 
of charges against the Government, from the occupation 
of Egypt to the moment when Baker Pasha's hopeless, 
helpless army was cut to pieces. The attack was bitter, 
forcible, and, from the Tory point of view, complete. Mr. 
Bourke sat down amid the cheers of his party, to await the 
apparently inevitable Ministerial reply. To the surprise 
of almost every one, no one rose from the Treasury bench. 
The House had not been very full when Mr. Bourke began 
his speech, for the number of private bills introduced, and 
the length of the speeches on the address, had driven him 
into that fatal epoch of the House for an important speech 
— the dinner-hour. The men who thought of dining while 
Edmund Burke was speaking have always successors m the 
House of Commons. Not all the vigor of Mr. Bourke 's 
attack, not all the tragic importance lent to it by the tid- 
ings from the Soudan, could keep a full House at the din- 
ner-hour. When Mr. Bourke sat down, the benches on 
both sides of the House were very thinly peopled. Mr. 
Gladstone had quitted the Treasury bench. Sir Charles 
Dilke and Lord Edmond Eitzmaurice remained, and Sir 
Charles Dilke had been taking notes of the speech, so that 
it was confidently expected that he would rise in reply. 
But Sir Charles Dilke made no sign. There was an awk- 
ward pause; the Speaker had actually risen to put the 
question, when Baron de Worms flung himself heroically 
into the debate with a lively attack upon the Government 
for their reticence, the ^' conscious silence of guilf But 
Baron de Worms could not hold out long. By the time he 
had concluded. Sir Charles Dilke had taken up his notes 
and gone away; Mr. Gladstone had come in and interjected 
a reply to some of Baron de Worms" s remarks, and had 
gone away again. The sole occupant of the Treasury 
bench was Lord Edmond Eitzmaurice, and Lord Edmond 
Eitzmaurice showed no intention of saying anything. B^ 



810 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

this time Sir Stafford Northcote had perceived the impor- 
tance of allowing the Government, if they liked, to take a 
division without answering the charges of the Opposition. 
Word was rapidly passed round the Conservative ranks to 
let the division be taken immediately. The order was im- 
mediately obeyed, though with great reluctance by some of 
the younger and wilder adherents of the party. These 
chose to believe that Sir Stafford Northcote was making a 
lamentable display of weakness in the face of the enemy; 
they did not see till afterward that Sir Stafford Northcote 
had shown himself an abler general and better leader by 
that single stroke than by any other act of his since the fall 
of Lord Beaconsfield. 

It was in vain next day that the Prime Minister tried— 
and on a motion of Lord Randolph Ohurchiirs for the ad- 
journment of the House — to explain the occurrence away. 
It was in vain that he assured the House that the Minis- 
terial silence was absolutely unintentional and regrettable; 
that it was owing entirely to a mistaken impression that 
the Conservative party intended to keep the debate going 
for some time, and that it would be better for the Govern- 
ment reply to come after all the charges had been made. 
The mischief was done; the Government had placed itself 
in a painfully false position. It really seemed as if the 
news of the calamity at Teb had stricken them into silence. 
No explanations could get over the fact that charges of the 
most serious kind had been brought against the Govern- 
ment and that not merely prudence but conventional 
courtesy had been set aside by the extraordinary reticence 
of the Treasury bench. The Conservatives were so much 
encouraged that they now announced their intention not to 
content themselves with an attempt to revive the question 
upon the report to the address, but to bring forward a 
solemn vote of censure upon the Government iii both 
Houses. The terms of the vote were curious; both Houses 
were invited to declare their opinion that " the recent 
lamentable events in the Soudan are due in a great meas- 
ure to the vacillating and inconsistent policy pursued by 
her Majesty's Government It is, to put it mildly, not 
often that a vote of censure is moved on so comparatively 
light a charge as vacillation and inconsistency. The serious 
opponents of the Government undoubtedly thought that 
the conduct of the Mmistry had been something more than 



ENGLAND UNDEE GLADSTONE. 311 

merely vacillating and inconsistent. A man. Lord Gran- 
ville had said in the debate on the address, might perhaps 
be accused of inconsistence if he opened his umbrella when 
it was raining, closed it when the rained stopped, and re- 
opened it when the shower began again. The course of a 
vessel compelled to tack might be called vacillating. It is 
presumable that the Opposition worded their vote of cen- 
sure in so guarded a manner in the hope of entangling 
Liberal malcontents who could hardly be expected to en- 
dorse by vote, or by abstention from voting, any more 
pronounced expression of Tory hostility. For the same 
reason, presumably, they limited the subject of their censure 
to affairs in the Soudan. They knew that many Liberals 
who were heartily with the conduct of the Government in 
Egypt up to a certain point were exceedingly dissatisfied 
with the way in which the Soudan question had .been 
bungled. The vote of censure may be taken, therefore, as 
cunningly addressed to the sweet voices of all the discon- 
tented and all the distressed on the Ministerial side of the 
House. Of course it came to notliing. It was carried in 
the Lords and rejected in the Commons in the middle of 
February. Its fiercest supporters were well aware that the 
Government majority would prove faithful, but it served to 
harass the Ministry well enough. In Egypt they were most 
vulnerable, and on Egypt then the Opposition unceasingly 
assailed them. Unluckily for the Government, they never 
did anything in Egypt until it was almost too late, until it 
appeared as if they had only been driven into it by the 
clamors of an indignant and patriotic Opposition. The 
Opposition were simply making use of Egypt as they would 
have used any other weapon which fate offered them where- 
with to wound the party in power. But the unhappy 
policy of the party in power sharpened the weapon that 
was directed against themselves. All through the early 
months of the new session the Opposition brought forward 
Egypt whenever they could, and demanded incessant ex- 
planations of the Government policy. 

On Monday, February 11, Mr. Bradlaugh made his reap- 
pearance. He had consented to wait so long after the 
opening of the session in order not to harass the Govern- 
ment by interference with the progress of the debate on the 
Queen's speech. The junior member for Northampton 
had every reason to believe that the interest aroused by his 



312 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

case was in no way abated. The House was crowded as it; 
only is crowded on great occasions. Members packed them- 
selves into the seats under the gallei-y which are not 
technically within the precincts of the House. They 
crouched uncomfortably on the steps of the gangway. 
They overflowed into the galleries above. They thronged 
about the bar. They grouped themselves behind the 
Speaker ^s chair. Wherever there was room to sit, squat, 
or stand, members huddled together. Naturally enough 
on an occasion when every one was anxious to come to the 
expected event as soon as possible, the questions occupied a 
longer time than usual. There were forty-four questions 
on the paper, and these must have been increased at least 
a third by additional questions arising out of unsatisfactory 
Ministerial answers. The two final questions brought up 
the difficulties in Egypt. A shower of interrogations were 
at once hurled from all parts of the House upon the Prime 
Minister. Mr. Forster, with the ill-concealed malice of a 
defeated statesman, who seizes eagerly upon every oppor- 
tunity of injuring his former colleagues, was anxious to 
know if the Government were, or were not, going to leave 
the garrisons of Sinkat and Tokha to their fate. Mr. 
Forster^ s cue was promptly taken up by the Opposition, 
always delighted to assist Mr. Forster in damaging the 
leader of his party. For a quarter of an hour Mr. Glad- 
stone was baited by the Oj)position with questions which he 
refused to answer respecting the intentions of the Govern- 
ment with regard to the beleaguered garrisons. But the 
final question was put at last. Then Mr. Bradlaugh, who 
had been waiting below the bar for some time in company 
with Mr. Labouchere and Mr. Burt, advanced solemnly to 
the table. While the Speaker rose to his feet and the air 
shook with shouts of '' Order,^' Mr. Bradlaugh produced a 
written document and a gilt-edged Testament, read the 
oath himself, kissed the book, and signed his paper. Then, 
gravely bowing to the Speaker, Mr. Bradlaugh withdrew 
to the bar. The Speaker thereupon, with some hesitation, 
as if he were not quite certain how to proceed, or as if the 
jireparation w^hich had undoubtedly been made by most 
parties to that day^s business had been but imperfectly 
mastered by him, called upon Mr. Bradlaugh to withdraw 
while the House considered upon his conduct. Mr. Brad- 
laugh immediately retired to the seat below the bax' of the 



EKGLAKD UKDER GLADSTOKE. 313 

House which he had occupied all through question time. 
An awkward pause was interrupted by Sir Stafford North- 
cote, who rose and proposed the familiar resolution that 
Mr. Bradlaugh be not permitted to go through the form of 
repeating the oath. Upon this resolution, which appeared 
somewhat lame and ludicrous after Mr. Bradiaugh had;, in 
a measure, taken the oath, a yery acrimonious debate, or 
rather wrangle, rose. Mr. Gladstone defended the inaction 
' of the Ministry, and announced that as the courts decided 
.that a friendly action could not be brought against Mr. 
Bradlaugh to determine the legality of his voting, the Gov- 
ernment had resolved that they would apply the test them- 
selves through the law officers of the Crown. Mr. Labou- 
chere defended Mr. Bradlaugh in a speech which, by its 
contemptuous treatment of the whole question of the oath, 
roused the angriest interruption from the Opposition, and 
a repudiation by Mr. Forster of any sympathy with the 
opinions of Mr. Labouchere, though he intended to vote on 
his side. Many Irish members rose on points of order to 
know whether Mr. Bradlaugh, in seating himself below the 
bar of the House, had fully obeyed the Speaker^ s order to 
withdraw. The Speaker ruled that he had. Mr. Sexton 
proposed an amendment to the motion, which by its terms 
vs^ould jDrevent Mr. Bradlaugh from voting. But as it was 
shown that Mr. Bradlaugh could vote on this very amend- 
ment, it was withdrawn. The division was taken, but be- 
fore the numbers were reported Mr. Healy moved that Mr. 
Bradlaugh^ s vote be expunged from the records of the 
House. Although the Attorney-General pointed out that 
this would have no bearing on the legal aspect of the case, 
as the very fact of the vote being disallowed would show 
that it had been given, the Opposition insisted upon divid- 
ing, and carried the motion by 258 to 161: majority, 97, 
The numbers for the original motion were then read, with 
the correction ordered by Mr. Healy^s motion. They were 
280 for, 167 against. Sir Stafford Northcote's motion: 
majority, 113, Sir Stafford Northcote then moved a resolu- 
tion '* that the sergeant-at-arms do exclude Mr. Bradlaugh 
from the precincts of the House until he shall engage not 
further to disturb the proceedings of the House."' After 
some further debate the resolution was carried by 228 to 
120: majority, 108. Mr. Bradlaugh, having voted once 
more in this division, then left the House, driving away 



;J14 ENGLAKD UNDER GLADSTONE. 

amid the cheers of the crowd, who had waited outside to 
learn the result of the business. He immediately applied 
for the Ohiltern Hundreds, stood again for Northampton, 
and was re-elected by a larger majority than before. As 
soon as the writ was returned to the House Sir Stafford 
Northcote ftioved his usual notice, excluding Mr. Bradlaugh 
from the House, which was, as usual, carried by a largo 
majority. 

As soon as the debate on the address came to an end, d 
change took place in the government of the House of Com- 
mons. Sir Henry Brand resigned the Speakership, and 
his place was taken by Mr. Arthur Peel. It had been 
known for some time that Sir Henry Brand was anxious to 
abdicate his office. He was no longer young, and the 
duties of a Speaker, always onerous, were made heavier 
than ever by the new conditions of Parliamentary life and 
the introduction of the new rules. On Monday, February 
25, Sir Henry Brand said farewell to the House over which 
he had presided for twelve years. Mr. Pamell, on behalf 
of his party, explained that they could not support the vote 
of thanks, in consequence of the unconstitutional action of 
the Speaker on the night of the coup cfetat, but that they 
would not press their objection so far as to take a division. 
The leader of the House and the leader of the Opposition 
vied with each other in tributes to the retiring official. Sir 
Henry Brand ackknowledged the vote of thanks in a sim- 
ple and affecting speech. In alluding to the protest of the 
Irish party he expressed his belief that they were acting 
from a sense of duty, and trusted that they believed him to 
have acted under a similar impulse in that part of his 
career which brought him into contest with them. He 
shortly after retired from the Commons, and went to the 
Upper House as Lord Hampden. I 

Mr. Arthur Peel, the new Sj^eaker, succeeded in surpris- 
ng the House very agreeably on the day of his nomination. 
Mr. Peel was a younger son of Mr. Gladstone's master and 
Mr. Disraeli's old enemy, Sir Robert Peel. He had been 
in the House nearly twenty ysars when he was chosen to 
succeed Sir Henry Brand, and during all that period he had 
spoken so seldom as to be fairly counted among the most 
resolute of the House's silent members. There were many 
members of the House who had never heard him speak, 
who might very well have doubted whether the son of one 



EI^GLAKD UNDEK GLADSTOiq"E. " 315 

of the greatest of Parliamentary orators had it in his power 
to make a speech. To what may fairly be called the 
unanimous surprise of the House, however, he made a 
speech on the acceptation of his new dignity, which, with- 
out exaggeration, might well be counted as one of the most 
remarkable that had been delivered in St. Stephen^ s in the 
present Parliament. In firm, dignified, expressive, really 
eloquent words the hitherto silent member expressed to a 
bewildered and delighted -House his conception of the 
duties of a Speaker, and his own earnest aspirations in 
some measure to fulfill them. Croesus saved from the pyre 
by the miracle-stirred voice of the dumb child could hardly 
have been more amazed than the majority of the House of 
Commons were on that evening late in February when they 
discovered for the first time that the man who seemed as 
silent as Athelstane was almost a Windham, and that they 
made the discovery just as he was assuming an office which 
would practically render it impossible for him to make any 
further use of his unexpectedly displayed ability. 

At half past six on Thursday, February 28, 1884, Mr. 
Gladstone rose to introduce the new Reform Bill. The 
Bill, Mr. Gladstone explained, might be regarded under 
any one, and, indeed, under all of three distinct and sev- 
eral aspects. In the first place, it was the redemption of a 
pledge 'long made by the Liberal party that they regarded 
Parliamentary reform as a vital part of the mission of the 
present Parliament. In the second place, it was intended 
to satisfy the general desire of the country for the extension 
of the franchise. In the third place, and above all, it was 
a proposal to add strength to the State. '' I take my 
stand, ^' said Mr. Gladstone, " on the broad principle that 
the enfranchisement of capable citizens, be they few or be 
they many — and if they be many, so much the better- 
gives an addition of strength to the State. "*' The Bill thus 
introduced was as simple and straightforward a measure as 
any measure dealing with a highly complicated franchise 
system, which it did not completely alter, could possibly 
be. Mr. Gladstone did not propose to *' reform it alto- 
gether.^' He had no desire to abolish the old existing sys- 
tems; and, speaking roughly, the new Reform Bill left 
them undisturbed. Only roughly speaking, for in certain 
special instances modifications were introduced by the new 
measure into the principles of existing franchise?. But, in 



31(3 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

general rather than in particular language, the Prime Min- 
ister's l^ill iiitroduced a variety of new franchises, and left 
the old ones unchanged. The existing borough franchise — 
leaving certain ancient rights which the Bill did not touch 
out of the question — was of three kinds. These were, first, 
the ten-pound-occupation fi*anchise established by the Ke- 
form Act of 1832. Secondly, the household franchise, 
created by the Reform Bill of 18(;7. Thirdly, the lodger 
franchise. The household franchise and the lodger fran- 
chise in boroughs remained practically unaltered. The 
ten-2X)unds-clear-yearly franchise was extended to the occu- 
jiation of land without buildings. 

One of the main features of the new measure was the in- 
troduction into the borough franchise of a right of voting 
which Mr. Gladstone christened *' Service Franchise. ^^ 
This franchise conferred a vote upon persons who, under 
certain conditions, occupy premises without being either 
the owners or the tenants of them. • This franchise, said 
Mr. Gladstone, was a far-reaching franchise. It included 
on the one hand men of high class, inhabiting valuable 
houses as the officers of great institutions, and on the other 
hand men of humble class, servants of gentry, servants of 
farmers or other employers of labor, who, without being 
themselves tenants, fully fulfilled the ideal of responsible 
inhabitants of houses. In the counties the existing fran- 
chise was also of three kinds. There was the fifty-pound- 
rental franchise, created by the Ohandos clause of the Re- 
form Bill of 1832. There was the twelve-pound-occupation 
frarchise of the Reform Bill of 1807. There was the prop- 
erty franchise, including freehold, copyhold, and leasehold. 
The fifty-pound franchise was to be abolished, as any one 
with that holding would obtain the franchise in other ways. 
The rating franchise was to be reduced from twelve pounds 
ratable value to ten pomids clear yearly value. All the 
borough franchises, household, lodger, and " service," 
were to be " imported " into the counties. The property 
franchise remained untouched. Precautions were taken in 
order to prevent the multiplication of fictitious votes. 
" There are fagots and fagots,^' says the wood-cutter in 
Moliere's famous comedy. " There are places,^' said Mr. 
Gladstone, " where one of the staple manufacturers was a 
manufacturer of fagot votes. ■'^ " I have in my posses- 
sion," said the Prirn.e Minister, amid the laughter of th^ 



ENGLAND UKDEE GLADSTONE. 317 

House, ** a photograph of an hereditament, a certain 
structure not very imposing in itself, occupied by a single 
person and conferring one occupation franchise, but held 
by forty-five owners, every one of whom stands on the regis- 
ter in virtue of his forty-fifth part of this building which 
qualifies only a single occupier/^ Redistribution was not 
touched upon in the present Bill. That question Mr. 
'Gladstone proposed to deal with in another measure at 
another time. 

One of the most important passages in Mr. Gladstone ^s 
speech was that in which he assured the House and the 
country that it was a vital and essential part of the measure 
that England, Ireland, and Scotland should be treated on 
a principle of absolute equality. In words of special and 
earnest emphasis, Mr. Gladstone announced that nothing 
would induce the Government to depart from its determina- 
tion to keep their measure complete in area. *' All the 
three countries have a case for enfranchisement arising out 
of the insufficiency of the present constituencies as com- 
pared with what they might be; but of the three the 
strongest is that of Ireland.^' The Government had taken 
up their position with regard to Ireland, and would not 
recede from it. They would make no compromise, at- 
tempt no half -measures. " I could bear no part in the 
responsibility of passing, perhaps, a Reform Bill for Eng- 
land and for Scotland, and then leaving a Reform Bill for 
Ireland to take its chance. " These words were addressed 
to the House of Commons, but they were leveled at the . 
House of Lords. The Prime Minister made it clear to the 
Upper Chamber that the Government had taken its stand 
on the incliision of Ireland in the new measure, and that 
they were prepared to champion that principle to the utter- 
most. At the conclusion of his speech Mr. Gladstone 
turned to the crowded Liberal benches. In words unusu- 
ally powerful and eloquent even for him, he asked them to 
put to themselves the question whether the Bill as a whole 
was worth having; and if it was worth having, to ignore 
all minor differences in the one great and united purpose 
of bringing it to success. " What we want to carry the 
Bill is union, and union only. What will defeat it is dis- 
union, and disunion only."' The cheers that rose from 
the Liberal party as Mr. Gladstone concluded were a suffi- 
Qient ^iiswer ^s to the union in their r^nks^ while the un- 



318 EKGLAND UlfDER GLADSTONE. 

wonted sight of spectators in the gallery joining in the ap- 
plause that is only the privilege of members, seemed to 
answer for the unity of the vast majority outside the 
House. 

The Egyptian difficulty and the necessity for obtaining 
Supply prevented the second reading from being moved 
until Monday, March 24. Mr. Gladstone was not able to 
attend the House in order to move the second reading. He 
had been absent from the House for some days, suffering 
from a violent cold, which he had caught one evening when 
leaving a reception at Lady Hayter's house. The cold 
proved more serious than had been expected ; the Prime 
Minister lost his voice for a time completely, so that even 
conversation had to be forbidden; a term of absolute rest 
was insisted upon by the doctors, and even Cabinet Coun- 
cils had to be held without his presence. Of course the 
wildest rumors flew abroad. It was confidently asserted by 
members of the Opposition and by the organs of the Op- 
position, that sickness of body was a mere pretense, and 
that sickness of heart and soul was the real cause of the 
Prime Minister's absence from his duties. Anger and 
mortification at the failure of his purposes and the thwart- 
ing of his plans were the reasons for his retirement alleged 
by one section; desjoair at the turn things had taken in 
Egypt, and at having to yield to his colleagues in sanction- 
ing the war in the Soudan, were the reasons adduced by 
others; there were not even wanting some to hint that the 
causes of his absence were of the same nature as those 
which, according to rumor, caused for a time the retire- 
ment of Chatham and, in later days, of Lord Brougham 
for a season from public life. 

In the absence of the Prime Minister it fell to Lord 
Hartington to move the second reading, which he did in 
silence, simply raising his hat when the measure was called 
from the chair. Lord John Manners immediately moved 
an amendment, declaring that the House refused to pro- 
ceed further with a measure " having for its object the 
addition of two million voters to the electoral body of the 
United Kingdom, '^ until it had before it the entire Minis- 
terial scheme, redistribution and all. Lord John Man- 
ners's speech was almost entirely founded upon a speech 
made by Lord Derby when he was Lord Stanley and a 
Conservative, against the Reform Bill of 1866, Lord John 



EKGLAKD ITKDER GLABSTOHE. 3l9 

Manners was replied to by Mr. Bright. Mr. Bright had 
not spoken very often in the new Parhament^, and even 
when he had, his speeches were not of a kind to give those 
who had not heard him of old any idea of the marvelous 
eloquence which had once made him famous. His reply 
to Lord^John Manners in this instance was not at first very 
promising. He seemed but the shadow of his former self; 
his words came slowly; his thoughts seemed vague and col- 
orless. He warmed up, however, when he came to that 
part of the new measure which treated of Ireland. At 
one time Mr. Bright had been looked upon .in Ireland as 
the especial champion of the grievances of the Irish people. 
He had lost that character of late; his action on Coercion 
had made him extremely unpopular; now once more, for 
the moment, he was resuming his old part. Mr. Bright 
eloquently protested against any principle of redistribution 
which should materially alter the proportion of seats in Ire- 
land. The Act of Union specially provided that Ireland 
should be allowed 100 members, at a time when the popu- 
lation was, roughly speaking, much the same as it is at the 
present time, when she is represented by 103 members. 
Mr. Bright earnestly protested • against any interference^ 
with the Act of Union to Ireland^s injury. It had, indeed, 
been interfered with when the disestablishment of the 
Church took place, but the principle which governed the 
one interference did not apply to the other, Mr. Bright 
went on to show that as the Act of Union was forced by a 
strong upon a weak country, the strong country had a 
right to relax any hard condition, but had no right to abol- 
ish a condition specially introduced in the interests of the 
weaker nation. • 

Perhaps the most important of all the speeches on the 
Bill was that of Mr. Chamberlain, on Thursday, March 
27. Ever since the new Ministry had entered into office 
Mr. Chamberlain had been steadily growing in power in 
the country. It had seemed something of a daring step to 
include Mr. -Chamberlain in the Cabinet when it was first 
formed; now it was obvious that any Liberal Cabinet which 
not merely did not include Mr. Chamberlain, but did not 
fully recognize his great importance and authority, would 
be an absurdity. Mr. Henry George, in one of his speeches, 
had said that if the English republic came soon Mr. Cham- 
berlain would belts fi.rst President; and the remark showed 



320 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

acute political insight. Mr. Chamberlain was as much 
the representative of the Radical as Mr. Gladstone was of 
the Liberal party; and the Radical party are clearly des- 
tined to be the ruling force in English politics. Perhaps 
one of the greatest tributes to Mr. Chamber] ain^s success 
and to his influence is paid him by the unconcealed dislike 
that the Wbigs and the so-called Liberals cherish against 
him. One morning the political world was surprised and 
amused by a curious expression of this dislike. Mr. Mar- 
riott, the member for Brighton, had rushed into print in a 
pamphlet tprm, after the fashion of eighteenth-century 
politicians, to vilipend and denounce Mr. Chamberlain. 
The pamphlet, as a mode of political warfare, is almost as 
antiquated as the Brown Besses of Ramilliesand Blenheim; 
but Mr. Marriott's pamphlet had almost as much success 
as ** The White Staff,"' or some unusually bitter number 
of the " Craftsman.'' It assailed Mr. Chamberlain with 
unmitigated and, it must be added, unmeaning abuse. 
The world was told a great deal about the orchids which 
Mr. Chamberlain chooses to wear in his button-hole, and 
it was held up as a terrible example of the inconsistency of 
politicians that a Radical should have a liking for flowers. 
Shortly after this eccentric dis2)lay of private and political 
jiique Mr. Marriott went over to the Conservative party, 
to whom he by right belonged, resigned his seat, stood 
again, and was successfully re-elected. There was nothing 
at all wonderful in the re-election. Brighton never was a 
town of advanced political ideas. It was generally Liberal, 
as Lady Tippins's husband was knighted, by mistake. No 
one ever looked upon Brighton as a stronghold of Liberal 
opinion, a sort of Birmingham Baia^; and when the electors 
of Brighton expi'essed their hostility to the Radical party 
by returning Mr. Marriott, nobody was or ought to have 
been in the least surprised. Yet if the Brighton election 
hiicl heralded the fall of the Ministry, the Conservative 
party could not have displayed a noisier delight. 

The point of Mr. Chambei-lain's speech on the second 
reading of the Franchise l^ill was a comparison between the 
position of the country in 1867 and the position of the 
country now. " The old order has given 2)lace to the 
new." That was the text of Mr. Chamberlain's homily: 
those were Mr. Chamberlain's words. With remarkable 
force and power, Mr. Chamberlain put forward the case of 



the agricultural laborer, in the face of tlie most persistent 
interruption on the part of the Opposition. *' They have 
been robbed of their lands: they have been robbed of their 
rights in the commons; they have been robbed of their 
open spaces. The agricultural laborers are still being 
robbed. You can not go into a single country lane in 
which you won^t find that the land-owners on each side 
have inclosed, or are inclosing, land which for centuries 
belonged to the people.^" Mr. Chamberlain went on to 
speak of the abuse of endowments for the poor. " I am 
not,"^ he said, '' bringing any charge against any party in 
tliis House with regard either to the robbery of land or the 
robbery of endowments. I take shame to the Liberal party 
quite as much as to the Conservative party. What I argue 
is that these wrongs would never have been committed if the 
agricultural laborers could have spoken for themselves in 
this House. ■'^ With regard to the inclusion of Ireland, Mi*. 
Chamberlain replied to Lord John Manners's statement 
that the Bill would make Mr. Parnell the grand elector for 
four fifths of Ireland, and declared that that rather hap- 
pily described Mr. Parnell^ s present position. " I am not 
by any means certain that this Bill will make any change 
m his great influence; but whether it does or not, unless 
this House is prepared to abandon all idea of constitutional 
treatment of the Irish question, unless it is prepared to 
abandon all idea of a representative system in Ireland, it 
should take care that the representative system there is a 
reality and not a sham, not a mere fraud and imposition. 
We may or may not like the opinions held by the majority 
of the Irish people, but we can not suppress them; and it 
is to our interest, it is in accord with statesmanship and 
good policy, that those opinions, however unpopular, should 
be represented — that we should tempt the people of Ireland 
to bring their grievances to a constitutional test, and not 
drive them to secret conspiracy. "" 

Mr. Gladstone made a reappearance in the House for a 
brief time on Monday, March 31. The occasion was a 
melancholy one. On the previous Friday the Queen's 
youngest son. Prince Leopold, the Duke of Albany, had 
died at Cannes, quite suddenly, in an epileptic fit. The 
popular voice is always predisposed to the praise of princes; 
but in the case of the Duke of Albany the praise and the 
regret appear to have been unusually genuine and unusually 
11 



:]'i2 EK(tLAKJ> L-N'DEK GLADSTOKK. 

deserved. Dr. JohDSon once said to Burke, wlio had 
praised a man for having gentle manners, '' Sir, you need 
say no more ; when you have said a man of gentle manners, 
you have said enough.'^ The Duke of Albany appears to 
have been pre-eminently a prince of gentle manners. His 
physical health had been feeble from his youth, and had 
debarred him from the custom of many exercises in which 
Englishmen especially delight, and in which his brothers 
distinguished themselves. But he found compensation in 
studious and literary tastes. In Miss Grace Greenwood^ s 
*' Life of Queen Victoria,"" she says that Dr. James Mar- 
tineau once described the Duke of Albany to her as " a 
yoimg man of very thouglitful mind, high aims, and quite 
remarkable acquirements."" The words might fitly serve 
as the young Prince"s epitaph. JSTot quite two years before, 
in April, 1882, he had been married to the Princess Helen 
Frederika Augusta, of Waldeck-Pyrmont, to whom he ap- 
pears to have been tenderly attached. 

The address of condolence to the Queen, and message of 
sympathy to the Du(^hess of Albany, were moved in the 
Lords by Lord Granville, and seconded by Lord Salisbur}^; 
the address in the House of Commons was moved by Mr. 
Gladstone, and seconded by Sir "Stafford ^NTorthcote. The 
condition of the House was peculiar. It might be said to 
have met for the discharge of a melancholy duty under ex- 
ceptionally distressing conditions. Mr. Gladstone, as we 
have said, had come back to the House after a serious ill- 
ness, had almost risen from his sick-bed, to be at his place 
to move the address. The Speaker was so ill that it was 
quite impossible for him to leave his room. The Deputy- 
Speaker, Sir Arthur Otway, was in almost the same condi- 
tion, and imder ordinary circumstances would not have 
attended the House. But it is one of the beauties of our 
Parliamentary system that it is assumed that the Speaker 
and the Deputy-Speaker never could both be ill at the 
same time. I^o provision has been made to meet the con- 
tingency, and in consequence the House, if deprived of its 
Speaker and his deputy, would be compelled to adjourn. 
In this emergency Sir Arthur Otway literally rose from a 
sick-bed to assist the perplexed Commons. To add one 
further complication to the difficulties of the situation. Sir 
Erskine May, the clerk of the House, was almost as ill as 
Sir Arthur Otway, and like Sir Arthur Otway was so weak 



EKGLAI^D UNDER GLADSTONE. 323 

and hoarse that he could hardly make his voice be heard. 
For the first time within the memory of man members of 
the House, to spare their Chairman^ s voice, rose and put 
their questions without being called upon by name. 

Affairs in Egypt kept on drifting from bad to worse. 
The Opposition peppered the Ministry with unsuccessful 
votes of censure on their Egyptian policy. This policy, a 
policy of ruling and not ruling Egypt, soon set them at 
odds with ISTubar Pasha. The Government set great store 
by the a|)pointment of ISTubar Pasha, and ISTubar Pasha was 
now only increasing their difiiculties by threatening to re- 
sign if he did not have everything his own way. The 
financial situation of Egypt, too, was gloomy. The law 
of liquidation, as it stood, forbade any further borrowing 
by Egypt. But Egypt^s liabilities were pressing. Some 
four and a half millions were owing for the Alexandrian 
indemnities alone; and, if these indemnities were to be 
paid, the law of liquidation would have been modified. 
The Government accordingly invited the Great Powers to 
consider the expediency of summoning a Conference in 
order to induce the signatories of the treaty of liquidation 
to consent to a modification of the law. Imj3ortant as this 
proposal was, it was almost lost sight of in the far greater 
public interest taken in the fortunes of General Gordon. 
Gordon was surrounded in Khartoum. '' I can only feel 
trust in God^s mercy," ^ he wrote to a friend, " for there is 
nothing else. '' Indeed, there did seem to be nothing else. 
The policy of the Government appeared to be one of mas- 
terly inaction. The '' Times,'' the " Telegraph,'' the 
'* Morning Post," and the " Pall Mall Gazette " received 
incessant letters from all quarters and all classes, urging 
the setting oh foot of some subscription in order to form an 
expedition for the relief of General Gordon, In the midst 
of the excitement the Government, in justification of its 
policy, published the Egyptian correspondence relating to 
Gordon. It can hardly be said that the correspondence 
proved a very satisfactory justification of the Government 
policy, but as a collection of historical documents it was of 
almost unrivaled interest. The communications from 
Gordon at Khartoum are the most important part of the 
correspondence. It must be admitted that Gordon's policy 
occasionally appears somewhat erratic. Again and again 
he makes urgent appeals for assistance, and curious sugges- 



334 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

tions about sending Turkish troops to relieve Khartoum. 
We hear of his sending out scouts to see if some army of 
relief is coming. '* He evidently thinks he is to be aban- 
doned/' telegraphs Sir Evelyn Baring on Aj^ril 18 to Earl 
Granville, " and is very indignanf There is an uncon- 
scious satire in those few words of Sir Evelyn Baring's 
which really deserves immortality. Gordon was in a place 
of peril, where he was attempting, almost alone, to accom- 
plish a well-nigh impossible task. He thought, perhaj)s 
unreasonably, that his suggestions were disregarded and 
his appeals for help neglected. Yet it appears surprising 
to the official mind that, under these conditions, he should 
consider himself abandoned, and be indignant at the 
abandonment. 

There was plenty to occupy men's thoughts at home as 
well as abroad. In London society much sympathy was 
felt for Mr. Edmund Yates, in his undergoing a sentence 
of four months' imprisonment for a libel which had found 
its way into the " World " without his knowledge. The 
returns of Mr. Henry Irving and Miss Ellen Terry from 
their unrivaled successes in America had about them 
something of the dignity of international episodes. Every 
Londoner took sides and fought fiercely over Sir William 
Harcourt's long-talked-of London Government Bill. The 
Bill proposed to put an end to the anomalous and divided 
methods by which the huge city, or, rather, collection of 
cities, which is called London, is administrated. Roughly 
speaking. Sir William Harcourt's measure proposed to 
extend the jurisdiction of the Cor23oration of London, 
•which at present only rules over what is technically termed 
** the City," to the whole of the metropolis. All the 
powers of the Metropolitan Board of Works were to be 
transferred to the Corporation. The Corporation itself 
underwent no small alterations. Every householder was 
to become a citizen under the same qualifications that 
regulate citizenshij) in other municij^alities. The Common 
Council elected by the votes of the citizens was to have its 
authority expanded from the City wards to the whole area 
of London, and to have everything connected with the 
metropolis under its control except the poor-laws, the 
police, and education. The Mayor and Sheriffs were to be 
elected by the Common Council, and a comprehensive sys- 
toni of district councils was i)roposed for carrying out the 



ENGLAND UNDEE GLADSTOI^E. 325 

work. One startling reformation the Home Secretary's 
measure meant to accomplish. It proposed to annihilate 
the time-honored, long-satirized, much-langhed-at office of 
London Alderman. 

On Thursday, April 24, Mr. Ohilders brought forward 
his Budget. It contained no striking remissions of taxa- 
tion; no very fascinating and original financial readjust- 
ments. Mr. Ohilders only counted u^^on a surplus of 
£268,000, out of which he proposed to give some slight 
relief to the taxation on carriages for hire. In order to 
deal with the perplexing question of light gold, the Chan- 
cellor of the Exchequer proposed the issue of a ten-shilling 
gold piece, containing only nine shillings^ worth of gold, 
and being, therefore, a token coin, like the crown and 
half-crown. The profit on the issue of this piece would 
allow of the withdrawal of all the existing light-gold coin- 
age, without inconvenience to the public or expense to the 
taxpayer. The new token would be only legal tender for 
a limited amount. Mr. Ohilders also proposed to create a 
two-and-three-quarters per cent, stock with quarterly 
dividends, liable to redemption in the fifth year of the next 
century, and a two-and.-a-half per cent, stock with no such 
liability. He proposed to effect the conversion of the ex- 
isting Consols and Reduced Three Per Cents, into one or 
other of these newly created stocks, the profit of the reduc- 
tion tlfus effected to be devoted to the relief of taxation. 
The way had, it was thought, been sufficiently prepared 
for this operation by the great rise in the prices of the 
Three Per Cents, and the existing Two and a. Half Per 
Cents, that had taken place during the previous two years. 

On the last. day of April the Government made a con- 
cession to Ireland. Mr. Dickson had brought in a meas- 
ure to amend the purchase clauses of the Land Act of 
1881. Mr. Parnell did not consider Mr. Dickson's bill 
strong enough, and to the surprise of the majority at least 
of the House, Mr. Trevelyan appeared to agree with Mr. 
Parnell. The Irish Secretary announced that the Govern- 
ment had for some time been maturing a more compre- 
hensive scheme for dealing with the purchase clauses of the 
Land Act, and could not therefore accept Mr, Dickson's 
slighter measure. 

Early in the year the " Times " lost its editor, and Ori- 
ental scholarship one of its most remarkable members, by 



326 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

the death of Mr. Thomas Chenery. Mr. Chenery ^as suc- 
ceeded in the editorshi]? of the " Times ^' by Mr. Buckle. 
Mr. Milner Gibson at the time of his death had passed 
almost entirely out of public view. At one time he played 
a prominent part in politics as an ally of Oobden and 
Bright. He was defeated at the General Election of 1868> 
and retired into private life. Music lost Mr. Hullah, 
mathematics Dr. Isaac Todhunter, law Mr. Benjamin, 
Q.C., and literature Mr. Blan chard Jerrold, Douglas 
Jerrold^s son. In the beginning of March R. U. Home 
died, at a very advanced age, at Margate. At one time he 
seemed likely to make himself a great name as a poet, but 
somehow or other he never quite made it, and of late years 
both he and his work might be said to be practically for- 
gotten. Few people ever read now, few people ever did 
read, the famous " Farthing Epic,'^ the " Orion,^' which 
Edgar Allen Poe admired so much. Mr. Home lived a 
curious, wandering, lonely life; he died a lonely death. 
His was not a very lovable nature, but he found people to 
love and befriend him to the end, and much of his later 
life was brightened by the affectionate kindness of one of 
the youngest of our young poets, Mr. Baddeley. Home's 
one wish was to be laid by the side of Charles Lamb at 
Edmonton, but for some reason or other the wish was not 
carried out, and he was buried at Margate, where he died. 
Of all that he wrote, and he wrote much, his " Death of 
Marlowe '' best deserves to be remembered. There is a 
grim power and j^assion in this one-act tragedy which is 
not unworthy of the poet it celebrates. Marlowe's dying 
words — 

"Oh, full and orbM heart. 
Flee to thy kindred sun, rolling on high. 
Or let the hoar}^ and eternal sea 
Sweep me away and swallow body and soul!" 

— have in them some echo of the mighty music of 
*'Faustus.'' 

On April 24 Madame Taglioni died in Marseilles. 
Though she was not indeed English, her name was once so 
famous in England, and she had lived in England so long 
after her fame had passed away, that her death deserves at 
least a passing mention. She made her first appearance in 
London in 1829, and at once became the rage. People 
raved about her, wrote about her, almost worshiped her. 



TEH'Gl^Jsri) I NDER GLADSTONE. ^^2^ 

Forty years later a quiet old woman was to be met in 
certain -London houses who was poor, and who maintained 
herself by giving dancing-lessons. This quiet old woman 
was all that was left of Tagiioni. " Here^s a sermon/^ as 
Madame de Berstein said when she showed Harry Warring- 
ton what her face was like in the days when she was called 
Beatrix Castlewood. Tagiioni is said not to have been so 
beautiful as Oherito, nor so dramatic as Fanny Elssler— 
whom Theophile Gautier idolized, whom the second 
J^apoleon adored, and who loved Frederick von Gentz— - 
but in her own way she was without a peer. 

On April 11 Mr. Charles Eeade died. If Mr. Eeade 
was not quite in the front rank of the novelists of the Vic- 
torian age, he was undoubtedly not very far removed from 
the front rank. If his name can not be written with those 
of Thackeray, of Dickens, or even of George Eliot, it un- 
doubtedly must be written immediately after them. Mr. 
Charles Reade has been very truly said to have developed 
for himself an entirely new branch of the art of novel- 
writing, the special gift of which was to convert a Parlia- 
mentary blue-book into a work of fiction. But although 
Mr. Eeade rendered sterling service alike to literature and 
humanity by these glorified blue-books, his greatest works 
did not come under that head. The tender charm of 
*' Christie Johnstone'^ fascinates without inculcating any 
theory. '* Peg Woffington/" almost deserves to stand as 
an exquisite re-creation of the" last century by the side of 
''Esmond.'' ''The Cloister and the Hearth'' is the 
most masterly historical novel that has been written since 
Scott. The character of Denys of Burgundy is worthy of 
the creator of Dugald Dalgetty. His cheery watch-cry of 
'' Courage, cariiarade, le diable estinort/' rings in our ears 
like the speech of a friend. How many, by the way, we 
wonder, of Mr. Charles Reade' s admirers are aware that 
the original of this very watch-cry is to be found, in Ital- 
ian, not in French, in one of Dryden's plays, from whose 
recesses Mr. Reade disentombed it and gave it a chance of 
immortality. 

In the same month died Henry J. Byron, dramatist and 
actor, and Mrs. Alfred Wigan, wife of one of the foremost 
actors of light comedy, as she was herself one of the fore- 
most actresses in the same style of what may almost be 
called a past generation. Many changes have come over 



•"^■^S EKGLAND r"Nt)'E:B r,I.AT)?;TOXE. 

the stage and all connected with it since the days when Mr. ■ 
and Mrs. Alfred Wigan wei-e at the height of their, success. 
We are in a new dramatic epoch, and tliey belonged to tlie 
old. To the younger school of pi ay -goers they are little 
more than a memory. The death of Mr. Michael Thomas 
Bass should not pass uncommemoi-ated, for his was a name, 
like that of Dr. Guillotin, " like to outlive Caesar 's.^^ Sir 
Michael Costa, who died at the end of April, took from the 
world of music one of its most remarkable figures. " Ten 
thousand eyes,'^ says Mr. Haweis, writing of him, ^^ for 
half a century at every great festival have been riveted 
u])on that figure. We shall see hhn no more; but he 
leaves to art an open secret, a bright achievement, and an 
unsullied name.^^ 

In Sir Bartle Frere the comitiy lost a statesman whose 
successes as an Indian official are pleasanter to dwell on 
than his failures in South Africa. Law lost Sir W^atkin 
W^illiams; literature, Mr. Mark Pattison, a scholar of a 
curious type, who left behind him some disagreeable 
memoirs. In Mr. Alexander Martin Sullivan, Ireland lost 
a true Nationalist, a gifted writer, and a brilliant orator. 
On Kovember 6 Mr. Fawcett died. His illness was sud- 
den; many hardly knew that he was ill till they heard of 
his death. 

The effect of the news of the death of Mr. Fawcett was 
very marked in the House of Commons. The sad tidings 
did not arrive until after question-time, and were only 
known at first to a few members of the Government; but 
they soon spread, and within half an hour were known to 
every member. It is not too much to say that the recep- 
tion of the news of the calamity wrought a distinct change 
in the outward appearance of the House and the bearing 
and demeanoi' of its occupants. In lobbies and corridors, 
in tea-room and dmiug-room and smoking-rooms, voices 
were lower than their wont, and the almost school-boyish 
merriment which is at all times characteristic of the House 
of Commons, even during the most serious political crisis, 
was hushed indeed. It was difficult at first to realize that 
the stalwart form, with the kindly face and the cheery 
voice, would never again make its appearance on the arm 
of his secretary or of some familiar friend in the place with 
wliich he had been so long and so honorably associated. 
Every ojie recognized that in the whole course of his public 



EjN'GLAND under GLADSTONE. 329 

career he was an honorable, upright, and gifted gentleman, 
whose life, darkened as it was by the terrible privation of 
blindness, presented to the public view the example of an 
antique fortitude, and to his private friends a dignified 
and lovable resignation. It may indeed be said of him, as 
of Milton's Lycidas, that in his own way of life he " hath 
not left his peer. '' He was succeeded in the office of Post- 
master-General by Mr. Shaw-Lefevre. 



CHAPTER XVIL , 

_HE FALL OF THE ADMINISTRATION. 

The year 1884 faded into 1885, and found the Govern- 
ment getting deeper and deeper into difficulties. The Irish 
question was as vexed as ever. Mr. William O'Brien had 
succeeded, in the face of many difficulties, in bringing to 
light the offenses of certain officials of Dublin Castle. A 
little later 'Mr. Trevelyan, weary of the post in which there 
was no honor to be gained, became Chancellor of the 
Duchy of Lancaster, and Mr. Campbell Bannerman was 
made Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant in his stead. 
But the chief difficulty of the Government was in Egypt, 
where the Mahdi was still defiant, and where Gordon was 
still shut up in Khartoum. For a long time the Govern- 
ment seemed disposed to take no steps to aid him in his 
sore need. In the end, however, a relief expedition was 
fitted out under the command of Lord Wolseley. Lord 
Wolseley had been so often successful that he came to be 
regarded in the English mind as a general who must always 
be successful. But the difficulties which lay in Lord 
Wolseley 's path in relieving Khar to am w^ere such as in all 
probability, under the conditions in which he acted, would 
have baffled a Caesar or an Alexander. The expedition 
moved its slow way along by the Mle route. The eyes of 
the world may be said, without exaggeration, to have been 
fixed upon that comparatively small body of men making 
their way through the desert to relieve Khartoum and to 
save Gordon. Evil fortune attended upon the expedition. 
Bad news trod on the heels of bad news. There were 
many desperate battles with the Arabs and much blood- 
shed, and many gallant lives lost on both sides. One of 



330 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

the most conspicuous names among the dead was that of 
Colonel Burnaby. Colonel Burnaby occupied a remarkable 
position in the eyes of his country. He had done a great 
many daring and desperate things. He was famous for 
that kind of reckless courage whose delight in attempting 
any desperate adventure increases in direct ratio with the 
danger it incurs. He seemed to bear a charmed life, for 
he had carried it safely away from so many perils. Among 
the khanates of Central Asia, in his wild ballooning expe- 
ditions, in his wanderings in all parts of the world, and, 
last of all, in his battles in the desert beyond Suakim, he 
had braved death many times in many ways and had 
escaped the danger. His turn had come, however, and he 
fell fighting bravely at Abu Klea, and sleeps beneath the 
yellow sand of the desert. He could hardly have wished 
for a more appropriate end to the fiery, fitful life. We 
are told that his health was such that he might at any 
time have fallen dead without any warning. He, at least, 
woidd have judged it better to die a soldier's death far out 
in Egypt than to drop dead suddenly on the steps of a 
London club or on the pavement of a London street. 

There were deaths in the expedition, and deaths among 
those whom the expedition was sent to save. There came 
a rumor that Stewart, Gordon's chosen companion on his 
eventful ride to Khartoum, and Frank Power, the gallant, 
reckless Irishman who acted as the ^^ Times'' correspond- 
ent at Khartoum, had been killed away from the city by 
treachery. The rumor was soon confirmed. Gordon was 
left alone in the city, which he was defending so well 
against such odds. At last one day came the final and 
fateful news. The advanced party of the expedition had 
pushed its way through many dangers within sight of 
Khartoum, only to find the baimers of the Mahdi flying 
over the conquered city, and to be hailed by the fire of the 
Mahdi' s followers. The advance expedition had to beat 
back in imminent peril; and in a few hours the whole 
Avorld knew that one of the most remarkable sieges in his- 
tory was over at last, that Khartoum had fallen, that Gor- 
don was no more. Seldom within the memory of living 
man has London shown more distinct marks of public ex- 
citement than on the afternoon wlien tlie posters of the 
evening papers announced the news of tlie fail of Khartoum 
and the probable death of Gordon. 



EHGXAKD UNDER GLADSTONE. .^.31 

Many persons liad confidently predicted that the death 
of Gordon and the fall of Khartoum would bring with it 
the fall of Mr. Gladstone's Ministry. These prophets were 
not justified. Although' the certainty of Gordon's death, 
in spite of occasionally conflicting rumors, soon became 
established beyond any reasonable doubt, although Khar- 
toum had fallen, the Ministry still held firm. They were 
able not merely to endure the fall of Khartoum, but to an- 
nounce the abandonment of the Soudan Expedition, and 
the withdrawal of the troops from Upper Egypt— not, in- 
deed, without bitter opposition and hostile criticism, but 
without Ministerial reverse. This decision left the Mahdi 
practically the master of the situation. It told England's 
Mohammedan subjects everywhere that a Mohammedan 
prophet had proved victorious over the armies of England, 
had killed one of her chief est soldiers, and had planted the 
green banner of Islam on the walls of the beleaguered city 
whose siege had been followed by so many myriads of eyes 
m every Eastern bazaar. It told them that the English 
army which had been sent to smash the Mahdi was rapidly 
retiring from the dominions over which the Mahdi held 
sway. All these facts stirred the Mahommedan world to 
its center, but did not shake — or did not appear to shake— 
the strength of Mr. Gladstone's Government. Even the 
fierce wrangle over Penjdeh, which seemed for one exciting 
week destined to fling England and Eussia into a war the 
end of which must be difficult to predict, but the result of 
which must certainly have been disastrous to all concerned, 
did not obviously impair the strength of the Government. 
Vote of censure after vote of censure was showered by a 
furious and despairing Opposition upon the Ministry with- 
out the slightest effect. Appeal after appeal to the certain 
test of the division-lobbies only recorded successive victories 
for the Government, successive assurances of the confidence 
of the House of Commons in the conduct of its leaders. 
Suddenly, almost startlingly, there came a change. The 
great scheme of reform had come almost to a conclusion. 
The Redistribution Bill — establishing sometliing like elec- 
toral districts with a single member for each electoral divis- 
ion, except in a very few cases, where the old form was 
preserved — ^had only to receive the final consent of the 
Lords. Then the Government that had accomplished this 
great task, and successively braved so many dangers^ met 



332 ENGLAN"D UNDER GLADSTONE. 

its fate. Mr. Childers^s Budget was the ostensible cause 
of the fall of the Gladstone Ministry. • Exception was 
strongly taken in the House of Commons, and outside it, 
to the proposals of the Chancellor of the Exchequer to in- 
crease the beer and spirit duties. The opposition was 
strong; the Chancellor of the Exchequer made some con- 
cessions, but not enough, and the opposition was kept up. 
It did not seem to be a matter in which the fate of the 
Ministry was likely to be involved ; but whisky was destined 
to prove as deadly to Mr. Gladstone's Government as water 
had proved to the Administration of Lord Beaconsfield. 
On Monday, June 8, a crowded House had Hstened to the 
long-drawn conclusion of the debate on the disputed point. 
To the general surprise of the House, two speeches — one 
by Sir Charles Dilke, and one by Mr. Gladstone — converted 
the debatable matter into a Cabinet question. Even then, 
at that eleventh hour, the House had no idea of what wan 
about to happen. 

The present Parliament has been fruitful in scenes of all 
kinds, but it has never witnessed a more striking or more 
startling scene than that which hailed the fall of the Glad- 
stone Government. Curiously enough, up to the last mo- 
ment there was practically no impression in the House that 
the Government were going to be defeated. Sanguine 
members of the Opposition showed by ingenious tabulation 
of figures that the Government would only have a majority 
of some five or six, and w^ould therefore suffer a moral de- 
feat. Hopeful Ministerialists, on the other hand, demon- 
strated that the Government could count upon a safe 
majority of twenty-seven to thirty. It was only when the 
division was well-nigh over, and the benches had pretty 
well filled, that any inkling of what was about to happen 
dawned upon the Senate. The keen eye of one • well- 
known Conservative suddenly discovered that the men 
from the "Aye^Mobby were almost all in, while the 
' ' No ' ' lobby was still pouring a steady stream of mem- 
bers into the House. On the Treasury bench one or two 
of the younger and less experienced members were observed 
casting anxious glances toward the door through which the 
followers of the Ministry were making their way back to 
their places. Rumor ran rapidly along the Conservative 
benches that the Government would have next to no 
n^ajority — would have no majority at all — would be m a 



Vw\ 



minority. Lord Kensington came in hurriedly, with a 
face set into determined absence of expression, and sat 
down by Mr. Gladstone. A few moments more, and the 
paper was handed to Mr. Winn amid the loudest outbreak " 
of cheering that the House of Commons has heard for more 
than a generation. Wild with delight. Lord Randolph • 
Churchill actually leaped on to the bench, waving his hat ^ 
with the enthusiasm of a school-boy. His friends clustered 
round him, caught at him, drew him down, but could not 
restrain him from the vehement expression of his delight. 
The example was contagious. The whole House to the 
left of Mr. Speaker roa,red and shouted, and thundered, 
and waved its hats, and clapped its hands in a frenzy of 
genuine delight. Their hour at last had come, and the 
fate of the Ministry was sealed. 

Mr. Gladstone immediately rose. For some seconds it 
was useless for him to attempt to speak, so long and loud 
were the trium^Dhant cheers and cries of his opponents. 
When at length he was suffered to speak, he announced 
that, in consequence of the vote that had just been given, 
it would be necessary for the Ministry to consider their 
position, and he accordingly moved the adjournment of 
the House. The next day he informed the House that he 
had placed his resignation in the hands of the Queen. 
Then followed an interregnum of odd uncertainty. Mr. 
Gladstone had gone out, but it was by no means certain 
that the Conservatives would come in. There were many 
among the Opposition who strongly disliked the idea of 
their party coming into office under such conditions. The 
Queen sent for Lord Salisbury. For a few days it seemed 
uncertain whether Lord Salisbury would accept the diffi- 
cult trust. ■ There were troubles to contend with in his 
own party as well as outside it. Lord Randolph Churchill 
was known to have a strong objection to the " old gang,^* 
as he irreverently styled the time-honored and somewhat 
slow-going politicians of the Opposition front bench. Lord 
Randolph desired to see younger men of the party given 
some opportunity of distinguishing themselves. This was 
one difficulty. Another was the question of coercion. 
That was a question Mr. Gladstone's Government would 
have had to deal with almost immediately if they had re- 
mained in office. Mr. Chamberlain and Sir Charles Dilke 
were known to be strongly opposed to any further coercive 



'l;J4 ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE. 

legislation, and it is probable that the Ministry would have 
gone to pieces over coercion if it had not tripped over the 
Budget. Among the Conservatives, too, opinions differed 
on the coercion question. Lord Randolph Churchill was 
not an advocate of coercive legislation. These, and the 
obvious discomfort of accepting office with a minority, for 
a time disturbed the Conservative councils. For some 
days all was suspense. Active negotiations were carried 
on between Lord Salisbury and Mr. Gladstone, between 
Lord Salisbur}^ and Lord Randoljoh Churchill. The situa- 
tion was epigrammatically expressed by Mr. Gibson. 
" For a fortnight,'^ Mr. Gibson declared, " the Liberals 
were in a state of suspended animation, and the Conserva- 
tives in a state of animated suspense. ^^ At last a definite 
conclusion was arrived at. Lord Salisbury accepted office, 
after allowing Lord Randolph Churchill to have well-nigh 
his own way in the composition of the new Cabinet. On 
Wednesday, June 24, 1885, the two parties changed sides 
in the House of Commons, and Mr. Gladstone addressed 
the chamber from the front Oj^position bench. Mr. Row- 
land Winn moved for most of the new writs for the re- 
election of '4;he new Ministers. After a stormy existence of 
a little more than five years^ the Gladstone Administration 
had come to an end. 



THE END. 



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give the floors, tables and shelves a new appearance. 
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MUNRO'S PUBLICATIONS. 



THE SEASIDE LIBRARY 

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LIST OF AUTHORS. 



Works by the author of *' A<ldie'« 
Husband." 

388 Addie's Husband ; or, Through 

Clouds to Sunshine 10 

504 My Poor Wife 10 

Works by the author of '* A Great 
Mistake." 

244 A Great Mistake 20 

246 A Fatal Dower 10 

372 Phyllis' Probation 10 

4G1 His Wedded Wife 20 

588 Cherry 10 

Mrs. Alexander's Works. 

5 The Admiral's Ward 20 

17 The Wooing O't 20 

62 The Executor 20 



189 Valerie's Fate 

^29 Maid, W^ife, or Widow? 

236 Which Shall it Be? 

339 Mrs. Vereker's Courier Maid. 
490 A Second Life 



10 
10 
20 
10 
20 
564 At Bay 10 

Alison's Works. 

194 " So Near, and Yet So Far !". . . 10 

278 For Life and Love 10 

481 The House That Jack Built. ... 10 



F. Aastey's Works. 

59 Vice Versa 20 

22.5 The Giant's Robe 20 

503 The Tinted Venus. A Farcical 

Romance 10 

R. M. Ballantyne's Works. 

89 The Red Eric 10 

95 The Fire Brigade 10 

90 Erling the Bold 10 

Anne Beale's Works. 

188 Idonea 20 

139 The Fisher Village 10 



Basil's Works. 

344 " The Wearing of the Green " . . 20 

547 A Coquette's Conquest 20 

585 A Drawn Game 20 

M. Beth am-Ed wards' 8 Works. 

273 Love and Mirage ; or, The Wait- 
ing on an Island 10 

579 The Flower of Doom, and Other 

Stories IC 

594 Doctor Jacob 20 

Walter Besaut's Works. 

97 All'in a Garden Fair . 80 

137 Uncle Jack 10 

140 A Glorious Fortune 10 

146 Love Finds the Way, and Other 

Stories. By Besant and Rice 10 

230 Dorothy Forster. 20 

324 In Luck at Last 10 

William Black's Works. 

1 Yolande 20 

18 Shandon Bells 90 

21 Sunrise : A Story of These 

Times 20 

23 A Princess of Thule 30 

39 In Silk Attire 20 

44 Macleod of Dare. 20 

49 Tliat Beautiful Wretch 20 

50 The Strange Adventures of a 

Phaeton 20 

70 White Wings: A Yachting Ro- 
mance .- 10 

78 Madcap Violet- 20 

81 A Daughter of Heth 20 

124 Three Feathers 20 

125 The Monarch of Mincing Lane. 20 

126 Kil meny 20 

13S Greeu Pastures and Piccadilly. 20 
265 Judith Shakespeare: Her Love 

Affairs and Other Adventures 20 
472 The Wise Women of Inverness. 10 
027 White Heather 20 



TEE SEASIDE LIBRARY. —Pocket Ediiion. 



R. D. Blackmore's Works. 

67 Lorna Doone. 1st half 20 

67 Lorna Doone. 2d half 20 

427 The Remarkable History of Sir 

Thomas Upmore, Bart., M. P. 80 

Miss M. E. Braddon's Works. 

35 Lady Audley 's Secret 20 

56 Phantom Fortune 20 

74 Aurora Floyd 20 

110 Under the Red Flag 10 

153 The Golden Calf 20 

2©4 Vixen 20 

211 The Octoroon ." 10 

234 Barbara ; or, Splendid Misery. . '20 

263 An Ishmaelite 20 

315 The Mistletoe Bough. Edited 

by Miss Braddon 20 

434 Wyllard's Weird 20 

478 Diavola; or, Nobody's Daugh- 
ter. Parti 20 

478 Diavola; or, Nobody's Daugh- 
ter. Part II 20 

480 Married in Haste. Edited by 

Miss M. E. Braddon 20 

487 Put to the Test. Edited by Miss 

M. E. Braddon 20 

488 Joshua Haggard's Daughter.... 20 

489 Rupert Godwin 20 

495 Mount Royal , . . . , 20 

496 Only a Woman. Edited by Miss 

M. E. Braddon 20 

497 The Lady's Mile 20 

498 Only a Clod. 20 

499 The Cloven Foot 20 

511 A Strange World 20 

515 Sir Jasper's Tenant 20 

524 Strangers and Pilgi-ims 20 

529 The Doctor's Wife 20 

542 Fenton's Quest 20 

541 Cut by the County; or, Grace 

Darnel 10 

548 The Fatal Marriage, and The 

'Shadow in the Corner 10 

549 Dudley Carleon; or. The Broth- 

er's Secret, and George Caul- 
field's Journey 10 

552 Hostages to Fortune 20 

553 Birds of Prey, 20 

554 Charlotte's Inheritance. (Se- 

quel to " Birds of Prey ") 20 

557 To the Bitter End 20 

659 Taken at the Flood 20 

560 Asphodel 20 

661 Just as I am ; or, A Living Lie 20 

567 Dead Men's Shoes 20 

570 John Marchmonfs Legacy. ... 20 

Works by Charlotte M, Braeme, 
A.athor of " Dora Thorne," 

19 Her Mother's Sin 10 

51 Dora Thorne 20 

54 A Broken Weddine-Ring 20 

68 A Queen Amongst Women 10 

69 Madolin's Lover 20 

73 Redeemed by Love 20 

76 Wife in Name Only 20 

79 Wedded and Parted 10 

^ Loi'd Ltynne's Choice. .....,,,,. 10 ^ 



148 Thorns and Orange-Blossoms ... 10 

190 Romance of a Black Veil 10 

220 Which Loved Him Best? 10 

237 Repented at Leisure 20 

249 " Prince Charlie's Daughter " . . 10 

250 Sunshine and Roses; or, Di- 

ana's Discipline 10 

254 The Wife's Secret, and Fair 

but False 10 

283 The Sin of a Lifetime 10 

287 At War With Herself It 

288 From Gloom to Sunlight K 

291 Love's Warfare 1 

292 A Golden Heart IG 

293 The Shadow of a Sin 10 

294 Hilda 10 

295 A Woman's War 10 

296 A Rose in Thorns 10 

297 Hilary's Folly 10 

299 The Fatal Lilies, and A Bride 

from the Sea 10 

300 A Gilded Sin, and A Bridge of 

Love 10 

303 Ingledew House, and More Bit- 

ter than Death 10 

304 In Cupid's Net 10 

305 A Dead Heart, and Lady Gwen- 

doline's Dream 10 

306 A Golden Dawn, and Love for 

a Day 10 

307 Two Kisses, and Like no Other 

Love 10 

308 Beyond Pardon 20 

411 A Bitter Atonement 20 

433 My Sister Kate 10 

459 A Woman's Temptation. 20 

460 Under a Shadow 20 

465 The Earl's Atonement 20 

466 Between Two Loves. 20 

467 A Struggle for a Ring ... 20 

469 Lady Darner's Secret 20 

470 Evelyn's Folly 20 

471 Thrown on the World 20 

476 Between Two Sins 10 

516 Put Asunder; or. Lady Castle- 

maine's Divorce 20 

576 Her Martyrdom . 20 

Charlotte Bronte's Works, 

15 Jane Eyre 20 

57 Shirley 23 

Rhoda Broughton's Works. 

86 Belinda.. 20 

101 Second Thoughts 20 

227 Nancy 20 

Robert Buchanan's Works. 

145 " Storm-Beaten :" God and The 

Man , 20 

154 Annan Water 20 

181 The New Abelard 10 

398 Matt : A Tale of a Caravan .... 10 

Captain Fred Buruaby's Works. 

375 A Ride to Khiva 20 

384 On Horseback Through Asia 
Minor ^ 



THE SEASIDE LIBRARY.— Pocket Edition. 



E. Fairfax Byrrne's Works. 

521 Entangled 20 

538 A Fair Country Maid 20 



Hnll Caine's Works. 

•t45 The Shadow of a Crime 

5::i0 She's All the World to Me. . 



20 
10 

Rosa Noucliette Carey's Works. 

-15 Not Like Other Girls 20 

3y6 Robert Ord's Atonement 20 

551 Barbara Heathcote's Trial 20 

608 For Lilias 20 

Wilkie Collius's Works, 

52 The New Magdalen 10 

102 The Moonstone SO 

167 Heart and Science 20 

■\68 No Thoroughfare. By Dickens 

and Collins 10 

175 Love's Random Shot 10 

833 " I Say No;" or, The Love-Let- 

ter Answered 20 

508 The Girl at the Gate 10 

591 The Queen of Hearts 20 

613 The Ghost's Touch, and Percy 

and the Prophet 10 

628 My Lady's Money 10 

Hugh Conway's Works. 

240 Called Back 10 

2.51 The Daughter of the Stars, and 

Other Tales 10 

301 Dark Days 10 

802 The Blatchford Bequest 10 

502 Carriston's Gift 10 

525 Paul Vargas, and Other Stories 10 

543 A Family Affair 20 

601 Slings and Arrows, and Other 

Stories 10 

J. Feuiniore Cooper's Works. 

60 The Last of the Mohicans 20 

63 The Spy 20 

309 The Pathfinder 20 

310 The Prairie ... 20 

318 The Pioneers; or, The Sources 

of the Susquehanna 20 

349 The Two Admirals 20 

359 The Water-Witch 20 

361 The Red Rover 20 

373 Wing and Wing 20 

378 Homeward Bound; or. The 

Chase 20 

379 Home as Foimd. (Sequel to 

" Homeward Bound") 20 

380 Wyandotte; or, The Hutted 

Knoll 20 

386 The Headsman ; or, The Ab- 

bave des Vignerons 20 

394 The Bravo 20 

397 Lionel Lincoln; or, The Leag- 
uer of Boston 20 

400 The. Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish. . . 20 

413 Afloat and Ashore 20 

414 Miles Wallingford. (Sequel to 

" Afloat and Ashore ") 20 

415 The Ways of the Hour 20 

#ie Jack 'i'ier ; or, The Florida Reef 20 



419 The Chainbearer ; or,The Little- 
page Manuscripts 20 

420 Sataiistoe; or. The Littlepage 
Manuscripts 20 

421 The Redskins; or, Indian and 
Iiijin. Being the conclusion 
of the Littlepage Manuscripts 20 

422 Precaution 20 

423 The Sea Lions; or. The Lost 
Sealers 30 

424 Mercedes of Castile; or, The 
Voyage to Cathay 20 

425 The Oak-Openings ; or, The Bee- 
Hunter 20 

431 The Monikins 20 

Georgiana M. Craik's Works. 

450 Godfrey Helstone 2» 

606 Mrs. Hollyer. 20 

B. M. Croker's Works. 

207 Pretty Miss Neville 20 

260 Proper Pride 10 

412 Some One Else 20 

Alpliouse Daudet's Works. 

534 Jack 20 

574 The Nabob: AStory of Parisian 

Life and Manners 20 

Charles Dickens's Works. 

10 The Old Curiosity Shop 20 

22 David Copperfield. Vol. 1 20 

22 David Copperfield. Vol. H.... 20 

24 Pickwick Papers. Vol. 1 20 

24 Pickwick Papers. Vol. H 20 

37 Nicholas Nickleby. First half . 20 
37 Nicholas Nickleby. Second half 20 

41 Oliver Twist 20 

77 A Tale of Two Cities 20 

84 Hard Times 10 

91 Barnaby Rudge. 1st half 20 

91 Baruabv Rudge. 2d half 20 

94 Little Dorrit. First half 20 

94 Little Dorrit. Second half. . . . : 20 
106 Bleak House. First half 20 

106 Bleak House. Second half.... 20 

107 Dombey and Son. 1st half 20 

107 Dombey and Son. 2d half 20 

108 The Cricket on the Hearth, and 
Doctor Marigold 10 

131 Our Mutual Friend 40 

132 Master Humphrey's Clock 10 

152 The Uncommercial Traveler. . . 20 

168 No Thoroughfare. By Dickens 
and Collins 10 

169 The Haunted Man 10 

437 Life and Adventures of Martin 

Chuzzlewit. First half 30 

437 Life and Adventures of Martin 

Chuzzlewit. Second half 30 

439 Great Expectations 20 

440 Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings....... 10 

447 American Notes 30 

448 Pictures From Italy, and The 
^udfog Papers. «fec 20 

454 The Mystery of Edwin Drood.. 20 
456 Sketches bj Boz. Illustrative 
of Every-day Life and Everv- 
day People <ifi 



TEE SEA BIDE LIBRARY. —Pocket Edition. 



F. Du Boisgobey's Works. 

8g Sealed Lips 20 

104 The Coral Piu 30 

264 Pi6douche, a French Detective. 10 
328 Babiole, the Pretty Milliuer. 

First half 20 

328 Babiole, the Pretty Milliner. 

Second half 20 

453 The Lottery Ticket 20 

475 The Prima Donna's Husband . . 20 
522 Zig-Zag, the Clown; or, Steel 

Gauntlets 20 

.523 The Consequences of a Duel. A 

Parisian Romance , 20 

"The Duchess's" Worlis. 

3 Molly Bawn 20 

6 Portia 20 

14 Airy Fairy Lilian 10 

16 Phyllis 20 

25 Mrs. Geoffrey 20 

29 Beauty's Daughters 10 

30 Faith andUnfaith 20 

118 Loys, Lord Berresford, and 

Eric Dering 10 

119 Monica, and A Rose Distill'd. . . 10 

123 Sweet is True Love 10 

129 Rossmoy ne 10 

134 The Witching Hour, and Other 

Stories 10 

136 "That Last Rehearsal," and 

Other Stories 10 

166 Moonshine and Marguerites 10 

171 Fortune's Wheel 10 

384 Doris 10 

312 A Week in Killarney ,.. 10 

.543 The Baby, and One New Yeai''s 

Eve 10 

390 Mildred Trevanion 10 

404 In Durance Vile, and Other 

Stories 10 

486 Dick's Sweetheart. 20 

494 A Maiden All Forlorn, and Bar- 
bara 10 

617 A Passive Crime, and Other 

Stories 10 

641 " As It Fell Upon a Day." 10 

Alexander Dumas's Woi'ks, 

55 The Three Guardsmen 20 

75 Twenty Years After 20 

*/<59 The Bride of Monte-Cristo. A 
Sequel to "The Count of 

Monte-Cristo " 10 

i!62 The Count of Monte-Cristo. 

Parti 20 

262 The Count of Monte-Cristo. 

Partll 20 

Georse Eliot's Works. 

3 The Mill on the Floss 20 

36 Adam Bede 20 

31 Middlemarch. 1st half 20 

31 Middlemarch. 2d half 20 

34 Daniel Deronda. 1st half 20 

24 Daniel Deronda. 2d half 20 

4» Roi*nia..,.. ...„..., 20 



B, li, Farjeou's Works, 

179 Little Make-Believe 10 

573 Love's Harvest 20 

607 Self-Doomed 10 

616 The Sacred Nugget 20 

G, Manville Feun's Works, 

193 The Rosery Folk 10 

558 Povertv Corner 20 

587 The Parson o' Dumford 20 

009 The Dark House . 10 

Octave Feuillet's Works. 

66 The Romance of a Poor Young 

Man 10 

386 Led Astray ; or, " La Petite 

Comtesse " 10 

Mi's. Forrester's Works. 

80 June 20 

280 Omnia Vanitas. A Tale of So- 
ciety 10 

484 Although He Was a Lord, and 

Other Tales 10 

Jessie Fothergill's Works. 

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20 Within an Inch of His Life. ... 20 

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555 Cara Roma 20 

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408 Lester's Secret 20 

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506 Lady Lovelace 20 

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159 A Moment of Madness, and 

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183 Old Contrairy, and Other 

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58 By the Gate of the Sea 10 

195 " The Way of the World " 20 

320 A Bit of Human Nature 10 

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376 The Crime of Christmas Day. 10 
596 My Ducats and My Daughter. .. 20 

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500 Adrian Vidal 20 

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402 Lilliesleaf; or, Passagfes in- the 
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527 The Davs of My Life 20 

528 At His Gates 20 

568 The Perpetual Curate 20 

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603 Agnes. 1st half 20 

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604 Innocent. 1st? half 20 

604 Innocent. 2d half 20 

605 Ombra 20 

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226 Friendsliip 20 

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238 Pascarel 20 

239 Signa 20 

433 A Rainy June. 10 

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589 The Luck of the Darrells 20 

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611 Babylon..- 20 

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428 Zero: A Story of Monte-Carlo. 10 
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331 Gerald 



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46 Very Hard Cash 

98 A Woman-Hater 

S06 The Picture, and Jack of All 

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210 Readiana: Comments on Cur- 
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213 A Terrible Temptation 

214 Put Yourself in His Place 

216 Foul Play 

231 Griffith Gaunt; or, Jealousy... 
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SccrBt 
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mi 



Mrs. J. H. Riddell's Works. 

71 A Struggle for Fame 29 

593 Berna Boyle 80 

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252 A Sinless Secret 10 

446 Dame Durden 90 

598 " Corinua." A Study 10 

617 Like Dian's Kiss 20 

F. W. Robinson's Works. 

157 Milly's Hero. m 

217 The Man She Cared For 20 

261 A Fair Maid 30 

455 Lazarus in London 20 

590 The Courting of Mary Smith. . . 20 

W. Clark Russell's Works. 

85 A Sea Queen 20 

109 Little Loo 20 

180 Round the Galley Fire 10 

209 JohnHoldsworth, Chief Mate.. 10 

223 A Sailor's Sweetheart 20 

592 A Strange Voyage 90 

Sir Walter Scott's Works. 

28 Ivanhoe 90 

201 The Monastery 20 

202The Abbot. (Sequel to "The 

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353 The Black Dwarf, and A Le- 
gend of Montrose 20 

362 The Bride of Lammermoor 20 

363 The Surgeon's Daughter 10 

364 Castle Dangerous 10 

391 The Heart of Mid-Lothian ..... 20 

392 Peveril of the Peak 20 

393 The Pirate 2C 

401 Waverley 2(! 

417 The Fair Maid of Perth ; or, St. 

Valentine's Day 2( 

418 St. Ronan's Well 2ft 

463 Redgauntlet. A Tale of the 

Eighteenth Century 20 

507 Chronicles of the Canongate, 

and Other Stories ^ . . . 10 

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429 Boulderstoue; or, New Men and 

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580 The Red Route 20 

597 Haco the Dreamer 10 

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348 From Post to Finish. A Racing 

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367 Tie and Trick 20 

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Frank E. Smedley's Woi'ks. 

333 Frank Fairlegh; or, Scenes 
from the Life of a Private 
Pupil 30 

562 Lewis Arundel; or, The Rail- 
road of Life... «0 



TBE SEASIDE LJ BR ART.— Pocket Edition. 



Euffeue Sue's Works. 

270 The Wandering Jew. Part I ... CO 

270 The Wandering Jew. Part U. 20 
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271 The Mysteries of Paris. Part II. 20 

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27 Vanity P'air 20 

165 The History of Henry Esmond. 20 

464 The Newcomes. Part 1 20 

464 The Newcomes. Part II 20 

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531 The Prime Minister (2d half).. 20 

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141 She Loved Him ! 10 

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565 No Medium 10 

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32 The Laud Leaguers 20 

93 Anthony Trollope's Autobiog- 
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147 Racliel Ray 20 

200 An Old Man's Love 10 

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298 Mitehelhurst Place .■•10 

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87 Dick Sand; or, A Captain at 

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395 The Archipelago on Fire 10 

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540 At a High Price 20 

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255 The Mystery 20 

277 The Surgeon's Daughters 10 

508 The Unholy Wish 10 

513 Helen Whitney's Wedding, and 

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514 The Mvstery of Jessy Page, and 

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610 The Story of Dorothy Grape, 

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247 The Armourer's Prentices 10 

275 The Three Brides 10 

535 Henrietta's Wish. ATale 10 

563 The Two Sides of the Shield.. . . 20 

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53 The Story of Ida. Francesca. . 10 
61 Charlotte Temple. Mrs. Row- 
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99 Barbara's History. Amelia B. 

Edwards 20 

03 Rose Fleming. Dora Russell . . 10 
05 A Noble Wife. John Saunders 20 

11 The Little School-master Mark. 

J. H. Shorthouse 10 

12 The Waters of Marah. John . 

Hill 20 

13 Mrs. Carr's Companion. M. G. 

Wighcwick 10 

14 Some of Our Girls. Mrs. C. J. 

Eiloart 20 

15 Diamond Cut Diamond. T. 

Adolphus Trollope 10 

20 Tom Brown's School Days at 

Rugby. Thomas Hughes 20 

22 lone Stewart. Mrs. E. Lynn 

Linton 2Qi 

27 Adrian Bright. Mrs. Caddy. . . . W 

49 The Captain's Daughter. From 

the Russian of Pushkin Kb 

50 For Himself Alone. T. W. 

Speight Id* 

51 The Ducie Diamonds. C. Blath- 

erwick 10 

56 "For a Dream's Sake." Mrs. 

Herbert Martin 2C' 

58 The Starling. Norman Mac- 

leod, D.D 10 

60 Her Gentle Deeds. Sarah Tjt- 

ler 10 

61 The Lady of Lyons. Founded 

on the Play of that title by 
Lord Ly tton 10 

63 W^iuif'red Power. Joyce Dar- 
rell 20 

70 A Great Treason. Mary Hop- 
pus 30 

74 Under a Ban. Mrs. Lodge 30 

76 An April Day. Philippa Prit- 
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78 More Leaves from the Journal 
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82 The Millionaire SO 

85 Dita. Lady Margaret Majendie 10 



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Misceiraueous— 'Continued. 

187 The Midnight Sun. Fredrika 

Br«flier , 10 

198 A Husband's Story 10 

803 John Bull and His Island. Max 

O'Rell 10 

218 Agnes Sorel. G. P. R. James.. 20 

219 Lady Clare : or. The Master of 

the Forges. From French of 

Georges Ohnet ... 10 

242 The Two Orphans. D'Ennery. 10 
853 The Amazon. Carl Vosmaer. . 10 
257 Beyond Recall. Adeline Ser- 
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266 The Water-Babies. Rev. Chas. 

Kingsley 10 

274 Alice, Grand Duchess of Hesse, 
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279 Little Goldie : A.Story of Wom- 
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den 20 

285 The Gambler's Wife 80 

289 John Bull's Neighbor in Her 
True Light. A '• Brutal Sax- 
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Sll Two Years Before the Mast. R. 

H. Dana, Jr 20 

S13 The Lover's Creed. Mrs. Cash- 
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822 A Woman's Love-Story 10 

323 A Willful Maid 20 

329 The Polish Jew. (Translated 

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330 May Blossom; or, Between Two 

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334 A Marriage of Convenience. 

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335 The White Witch 20 

338 The Family Difficulty. Sarah 

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340 Under Which King? Compton 

Reade 20 

341 Madolin Rivers ; or, The Little 

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Laura- Jean Libbey 20 

347 As Avon Flows. Henry Scott 

Vince 20 

850 Diana of the Crossways. George 

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352 At Any Cost. Edward Garrett. 10 

354 The Lottery of Life. A Story 

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Ago. John Brougham 20 

355 The Princess Dagomar of Po- 

land. Heini'ich Felbermann. 10 
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865 George Ciiristy; or, The For- 
tunes of a Minstrel. Tony 
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366 The Mysterious Hunter; or, 
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369 Miss Bretherton. Mrs. - Hum- 
jthry Ward ^ 20 



374 The Dead Man's Secret. Dr. 

Jupitsr Paeon 20 

381 The Rek Cardinal. Frances 

Elliot 10 

382 Three Sisters. Elsa D'Esterre- 

Keeling 10 

383 Introduced to Society. Hamil- 

ton Aid 6 10 

387 The Secret of the Cliffs. Char- 
lotte French 20 

389 Ichabod. A Portrait. Bertha 

Thomas , 10 

399 Miss Brown. Vernon Lee 20 

403 An EngUsh Squire. C. R. Cole- 
ridge 20 

405 My Friends and I. Edited by 

Julian Sturgis 10 

406 The Merchant's Clerk. Samuel 

Warren 10 

407 Tylney Hall. Thomas Hood. . . 20 
426 Venus's Doves. Ida Ashworth 

Taylor. 20 

430 A Bitter Reckoning. Author 

of "By Crooked Paths".... 10 
432 The Witch's Head. H. Rider 

Haggard » 20 

435 Klytia : A Story of Heidelberg 

Castle. George Taylor 20 

436 Stella. Fanny Lewald 20 

441 A Sea Change. Flora L. Shaw. 20 

442 Ranthorpe. George Henry 

Lewes 20 

443 The Bachelor of the Albany. . . 10 
452 In the West Countrie. May 

Crommelin 20 

457 The Russians at the Gates of 

Herat. Charles Marvin 10 

458 A Week of Passion; or, The 

Dilemma of Mr. George Bar- 
ton the Younger. Edward 
Jenkins 20 

462 Alice's Adventures in Wonder- 
land. Lewis Carrol 

With forty-two illustrations 
by John Tenniel 20 

468 The Fortunes, Good and Lad, 
of a Sewing-Girl. Charlotte 
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473 A Lost Son. Mary Linskill .... 10 

474 Serapis. An Historical Novel. 

George Ebers 20 

479 Louisa. Katharine S. Macquoid 20 

483 Betwixt My Love and Me 10 

485 Tinted Vapours. J. Maclaren 

Cobh-xn 10 

491 Society in London. A Foreign 

Resident lO 

493 Colonel Enderby's Wife. Lucas 

Malet 20 

501 Mr. Butler's Ward. ' F. Mabel 

Robinson 20 

510 A Mad Love. Author of " Lover 

and Lord" 10 

512 The Waters of Hercules 20 

504 Curly : An Actor's Story. John 

Coleman 10 

505 The Society of London. Count 

PaulVasili .^^. ...... -10 

509 Nell HajGCeades. ?<ghe j^opkias i^ 



THE 8EA8TDW LTBBAET.— Pocket Edition. 



20 



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M8 The Hidden Sin 20 

619 James Gordon's Wife 20 

526 Madame De Presnel. JS>. Fran- 
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532 Arden Court. Barbara Graham ^0 

536 Dissolving: Views. By Mrs. An- 
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545 Vida's Story. By Uie author of 

" Guilty Without Crime " 

546 Mrs. Keith's Crime. A Novel . . 

583 Hazel Kirke. Marie Walsh 

566 The Royal Highlanders ; or, 

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Jautes Grant 

171 Paul Crew's Story. Alice Co- 

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583 Victory Deane. Cecil Griffith.. 20 

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eiEORGE MUNRO, Munro's Publishing House, 

p.- O. Box 3751. ir to ii7 Vandewater Street, N. Y. 



NOW READY— Beautifully lounoL in Cloth— PEIOE 50 CENTS. 



A NEW PEOPLE'S EDITION 

OF THAT MOST DELIGHTFUL OF CHILDREN'S STORIES, 

Mice's AdYentures in Wonderland. 

By LEWIS CARROLIL, 
Author of *• Through, the Looking-Glass," etc, 

fVith Forty-two Beautiful Illustrations by John Tenniel. 

The most delicious and taking nonsense for children ever written, A 
book to be read by all mothers to their little ones. It makes them dance 
with delight. Everybody enjoys the fun of this charming writer for the 
nursery. 

THIS NE"W PEOPLE'S EDITION, BOUND IN CLOTH, PRICE 50 CENTS, 

IS PRINTED IN LARGE, HANDSOME, READABLE TYPE, 

WITH ALL THE ORIGINAL ILLUSTRATIONS 

OF THE EXPENSIVE ENGLISH EDITION. 



Stent by Iflail on. Receipt otf SO Cents. 



Address GEORGE MUNRO, Mnuio's Publishing House, 
P» O? Vko% 3'y«|l. IT to tJ7 VaudewR-ter Streets New York, 



l^TT2>TT^O ' S 



DIALOGUES AND SPEAKERS. 



PRICE TEi\ CEi\XS. 



These books embrace a series of Dialogues and Speeches, all new and 
original, and are just what is needed to give spice and merriment to Social 
Parties, Home Entertainments, Debating Societies, School Rdcitations, 
Amateur Theatricals, etc. They contain Irish, German, Negro, Yankee, 
and, in fact, all kinds of Dialogues and Speeches. The following are the 
titles of the books: 

No. 1. THE FUNNY FELLOW'S DIALOGUES. 

No, 2. THE CLEMENCE AND DONKEY DIALOGUES. 
No. 8. MRS. SMITH'S BOARDERS' DIALOGUES. 
No. 4. SCHOOLBOYS' COMIC DIALOGUES. 



No. 1. TOT I KNOW 'BOUT GRUEL SOCIETIES SPEAKER. 
No. 2. JOHN B. GO-OFF COMIC SPEAKER. 
No. 3. MY BOY VILHELM'S SPEAKER. 

The above titles express, in a slight degree, the contents of the book^ 
which are conceded to be the best series of mirth-provoking Speeches and 
Dialogues extant. Address 

GEORGE MUNRO, 

MuNRo's Publishing House, 

P. 0. Box 3751. 17 to 37 Vandewater Street, N. Y. 



MUNRO'S PtJBLlCATIOKS, 



Old Sleuth Library 

A Series of the Most Thrilling Detective 
Stories Ever Published I 



NO. PRICE. 

1 Old Sleutli the Detective 10c 

2 The Kiii^ of the Detectives 10c 

3 Old Sleuth's Triumph. First half. 10c 

3 Old Sleuth's Triumph. Second half 10c 

4r Under a Million Disguises 10c 

5 Night Scenes in New York. - 10c 

6 Old Electricity, the Lightning Detective 10c 

7 The Shadow Detective. First half 10c 

7 The Shadow Detective. Second half 10c 

8 Red-Light Will, the River Detective 10c 

9 Iron Burgess, the Government Detective iOc 

10 The Brigands of New York 10c 

11 Tracked hy a Ventriloquist 10c 

12 The Twin Detectives 10c 

13 The French Detective 10c 

14: Billy Wayne, the St. Louis Detective 10c 

15 The New York Detective lOe 

16 O'Neil McDarragh, the Irish Detective 10c 

17 Old Sleuth in Harness Again 10c 

18 The Lady Detective 10c 

19 The Yankee Detective 10c 

20 The Fastest Boy in New York 10c 

21 Black Raven, the Grcorgia Detective 10c 

22 Nighthawk, the Mounted Detective 10c 

23 The Gypsy Detective lOe 

The Publisher will send any of the above works by mail, postal 
prepaid, on receipt of the price. Address 

GEORGE MUNRO, 

Munro's Publishing: House, 

P. 0. Box 3751. 17 to 27 Vandewater St., N. Y. 




PKARS' SOAP removes the irritahility, redness 
and Uotchy appearance of ilie skin from which many 
children suffer. It is unrivaled as a pure, delight- 
ful TOILET SOAP, and is for sale throughout the 
civilized world* 



The New York Fashion Bazar. 

THE BEST AMERICAN HOME MAGAZINE. 

Price 25 Cents per Copy. Subscription Price S3. 00 per Year, 



Among its regular contributors are Mary Cecil Hay, "The Dltchess," 
author of " Molly Bawn," Lucy Randall Comfort, Charlotte M. Braeme, 
author of "Dora Thorne," Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller, Mary E. Bryan, 
author of " Manch," and Florence A. Warden, author of " The House on the 
Marsh," 



COMMENTS OF THE PRESS: 



The fast number of The New York 
Fashion Bazar has been made more 
than usually attractive, and is full of 
seasonable and interesting reading and 
illustrations. The Fashion Bazar for 
1886 promises great inducements to 
subscribers, the publisher having add- 
ed new features that add to its interest. 
A handsome oil chromo, " Merry Little 
Mischief," is given to each subscriber. 
Send for it through your bookseller, or 
direct to George Munro, Publisher, 
New York. — Sarnia (Ont.) Observer. 

The Christmas number of The New 
York Fashion Bazar, besides the usual 
number of fashion plates, embroidery 
patterns, stories, etc., presents its read- 
ers with a beautiful chromo supple- 
ment entitled " Merry Little Mischief." 
— N. Y. Weekly Witness. 

The New York Fashion Bazar has 
taken its place as the leading periodical 
of the kind in America. It covers the 
whole ground of fashions in all its de- 
partments, and is an indispensable 
publication for any one interested in 
such matters— and what lady is not? 
The Christmas number is especially 
attractive, and is filled with useful in- 
formation. One great advantage of 
this publication is that the patterns 
and all descriptions are so explicit that 
no one ever has trou"ble in understand- 
ing them. Ask your newsdealer for 
The New York Fashion Bazar, or if 
you can not get it of him, address 
George Munro,New York.— Cincinnati 
Times-Star. 

The New York Fashion Bazar now 
on sale at the book stores, is filled with 
stylish designs for ladies' and chil- 
dren's wear for fall and winter, both 
for in-door and out-door use. It is the 
most handsomely illustrated fashion 
journal in America and is a great fa- 
vorite with the ladies. — Sarnia Ob- 
server. 



The Christmas number of George 
Munro's New York Fashion Bazar 
makes a very handsome appearance 
with its illustrated cover. A beautiful 
chromo supplement accompanies this 
number, while the reading matter is 
up to the usual high standard of this 
periodical. — Neiv York Herald. 

The New York Fashion Bazar is 
bristling, as usual, with bright things 
for the ladies. The various fashion 
plates illustrate the latest styles in 
wearing apparel, and the embroidery 
department gives some very pretty 
designs. A new story by " The Duch- 
ess," entitled "Lady Branksmere," is 
commenced in this number. The Bazar 
is a large magazine, worth much more 
than the price, which is only $3.00 per 
year. Single copies, 25 cents. Geo. 
Munro, publisher, 17 to 27 Vandewater 
Street, New York. — Watson'' s Illumi- 
nator, Biddeford, Me. 

The New York Monthly Fashion 
Bazar, issued by George Munro, 17 to 
27 Vandewater Street, New York City, 
gives illustrations of latest styles in 
ladies' and children's dress, hints in 
making and buying goods, colored 
fashion plates, embroidery patterns, 
and household miscellany, in addition 
to numerous short and continued sto- 
ries and literary chit-chat. $3.00 per 
year, or 25 cents for single number. — 
Boston Index. 

The New York Fashion Bazar. The 
current number of this valuable month- 
ly is unusually brilliant and attractive* 
The illustrations are in the highest style 
of the art, and ladies who are ambitious 
to be gorgeously appareled should not 
fail to examine it. It is published by 
George Munro, at 17 to 27 Vandewater 
Street, New York. Single copies 25 
cents. Subscription price $3.00 per 
annum . — Na tional Presbyterian. 

The New York Fashion Bazar is for sale by all newsdealers, price 25 cents 
per copy. Subscription price $3.00 per year. Address 

GEORGE MUNRO, Munro's Publishing House, 

P. O. Box 3751. 17 to 27 Vandewater Street, N. Y. 



THE CELEBRATED 

SORMER 



GEAND, SQTJAEE AM UPRIGHT PIANOS, 



FIRST PRIZE 

DIPLOMA. 

Centennial Exhibi- 
tion, 1876: Montreal, 
1881 and 1882. 

The enviable po- 
sition Sohmer & 
Co. hold among 
American Piano 
Manufacturers is 
solely due to the 
merits of their in- 
struments. 




They are u 
in Conserva 
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Seminaries, on 
count of their 
perior tone a 
unequaled du 
bility. 

The SOHIV 
Piano is a spt 
favorite with 
leading mu^ic 
and critics. 



ARE AT PRESENT THE MOST POPULAR 
AND PREFERRED BY THE LEADING ARTISTE 
SOHMER «fe CO., Manufacturers, No. 149 to 155 E. 14th Street, N. Y. 




FRO 31 THE 
NERVE- GIVING 
PRINCIPLES OF 
THE OX-BRAIN 
AND THE GERIM 
OF THE AVHEA'l' 
AND OAT. 



BRAIN AND NETOFOOD 

VITALIZED PIIHpHITES 

Is a standard witli all Phvs^ans Avho treat 
nervous or mental disorders. It builds up 
worn out nerves, banishes sleeplessness, 
neuraleria and sick headache. It promotes 
p:ood digestion. It restores the energry lost 
by nervousness, debility, or over-exliaust- 
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" It amplifies bodily and mental power to 
the present generation, and proves the siu-- 
vival of the fittest to the next."— Bismarck. 



" It strengthens nervous power. It is the 
only medical relief I have ever known for 
an over- worked brain."— Gladstone. 



NEW 



TABERNACLE_ mmi 

Preached in the Brooklyn TabernacI 
By Rey. T. DeWitt Talinagre, D 

12mo. Hnndsoniply Round in t'lolli $1.00. 



CONTENTS : 



Brawn and Muscle. 

The Pleiades and Orion 

The Queen's Visit. 

Vicarious Suffering. 

Pes I humous Opportu- 
nity. 

The Lord's Razor. 

Windows Toward Je- 
rusalem. 

Stormed and Taken. 

All the World Akin. 

A Blonientous Quest. 

The Gi'eat Assize. 

The Road to the City. 

The Ransondess. 

The Three Groups. 



The Insignificant. 
The Three Rhigs. 
How He Came to 

It. 
Castle Jesus. 
Stripping the Slai 
Sold Out. 
Summer Temptat 
The Banished Que' 
The Daj' We Live 
Capital and Ivabo 
Tobacco and Opii 
Despotism ot 

Needle. 
Why are Satan andfi 

Permitted? 



" I really urge you to put it to the test."— 
Miss Emily Faithful. 



F. CROSBY CO:, 56 W. 25th St., 

For sale by Druggists, or by mail 

¥ff- 



The book will be forwarded, postage pr 
paid, on receipt of price, $1.00. Address 



Y. (iKORGE nVNUO, .Miinru's I'MblUhinir Honsc, 

l>. tl^toxsSTal. 1 7 to 27 ViinilfWiiter St., N 



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